Neither Man Nor Dog

by Gerald Kersh

  They said good-bye to her at Figueras and, all alone, she walked on. She realised then that, for the first time in her life, she was sick. It was not a sickness of the body: it was a sickness of the soul. Remember, she was being torn away from where she belonged; and she was not accustomed to being alone.

  She reached Peralada. The roads were choked with people who wanted to get away, anywhere, away from the Fascists. She says that her feet felt like dead feet, and that each of her legs seemed to weigh as much as a paving-stone. More and more frequently she had to sit down and rest. Then her shoulders began to ache. It was the weight of the bundle. She began to be aware of it. She shifted it from left hand to right, and from right to left, every hundred yards. Then she had to sit down and rest again. Time is long to the weary. She had lived seventy years, but the sum of all those years seemed less than the time that passed on her infinitely slow and painful journey between Peralada and Llansa.

  Llansa had the air of an encampment on the edge of the wilderness during the Exodus from Egypt. There was a kind of hideous cavalcade of the homeless on the run. She, who had always been proud of her strength, found herself raising hopeful hands towards passing cars and lorries. But every vehicle was full. Between Llansa and San Miguel Maria felt that her strength had quite gone out of her. She sat away from the road upon her bundle and closed her eyes and waited for death. Understand that this was a peasant woman who had relied upon herself and grown accustomed to being relied on for half a century. And now, when her own force was failing her, she felt that she was as good as dead.

  There was an atmosphere of death hanging over that hideous road. People, running away, had taken with them all they valued. Then, as the way became hard, they had bit by bit abandoned the possessions that encumbered them. Oncoming refugees had pushed things aside. The road was hideously lined with the pathetic droppings of families in flight. Near where Maria sat there lay a vast brass tray which had once held a Moorish coffee set. Near this, lying on its side, a child’s cradle, seven copper saucepans, and a lamp. Dust was already drifting over the surface of a mahogany table, which loving hands had polished for eighty years. A large black marble clock disgorged a quivering spring: it had burst where it had fallen. Four cushions lay piled upon a dusty stone. An immense feather-bed let out a thick white stream of down, which the wind of passing cars stirred in small swirls. The refugees were throwing down the things they had wanted to save. They were even leaving their means of conveyance by the roadside. Here, a juiceless car stood, hot and dusty, but silent; there, a bicycle lay very flat with a broken fork. There was also a little patient donkey, quite dead, perhaps from exhaustion.

  Maria saw the significance of all this. It is hard to save both yourself and the things you possess. She sat for a long time thinking. Could she save, at least, the ebony crucifix with its patient white Christ? No. She would leave it all behind her and go on. Somewhere, on the other side of the frontier, she would find Juanito. Then she would resume her career, her service. She stood up, and without looking behind her, trudged on, reached San Miguel. She had a little money, with which she bought more food to take with her; then left San Miguel, threading her way along that nightmarish white road which rose in powder as her feet struck it, and seemed to cling to the roof of her mouth in dry astringent dust. The way was more and more encumbered with dropped treasures. Maria was numb with fatigue and with the misery of change. Was it the will of God, she wondered, that in her old age she must lose all she ever acquired and die alone and poor among strangers whose language she could not speak? She drove the thought away. Her will lashed her failing body forward.

  At last she reached Port Bou. The people who were passing seemed, now, to move faster. They, also, were exhausted. But Port Bou represented the beginning of the last lap, and so they hurried as people do, when they are reaching the end of a long and wretched journey.

  She remembers that there was a railway tunnel . . . a sort of black cave into which people were throwing themselves. It looked to her like an open mouth, but she drew herself together and walked into that thick and dreadful darkness thinking of the Valley of the Shadow of Death and how one should fear no evil. That tunnel is not very long, but to Maria it seemed to have no end; and when she felt that, like a woman in a nightmare, she was condemned to walk for ever and ever in thick darkness. . . . When she began to wonder whether she had become blind . . . she saw a little semi-circle of light which was the end of the tunnel and so came out and reached Cerebere.

  And there she lay down by the road and closed her eyes and slept. She was on safe territory. Before she slept, quite un-reasoningly, she prayed “Dear Lord . . . my ivory Christ . . .” she wanted it back. And so sleep came upon her and when she awoke the day was fading. She sat up. It had been her habit, before she had abandoned her bundle, to reach out her hand after resting and ascertain that it was still there. She reached out her hand and touched a familiar rough surface. It was her bundle.

  Now there is no doubt at all that somebody, finding the bundle she had left, had picked it up and carried it with him; and in due course abandoned it: and that somebody else had picked it up, with a view to opening it later on, and in turn thrown it down . . . and that this bundle had gone from hand to hand all along that road, to be finally abandoned near where Maria lay by the roadside at Cerebere. There is a perfectly logical explanation that fits it.

  But Maria swears that it was a saint, or a spirit, or just the power of her prayer that somehow brought her ivory Christ back to her, as it were, out of a deep sleep. She knew then, she says, that all would be well. It is certainly a fact that she found Juanito, and they live in comparative peace in Switzerland to this very day.

  Destiny and the Bullet

  It was at the beginning of the war. There was a smell of stuffiness and of doom. Rumour, that lying slut, had reared her bedraggled head. Nobody knew where everything was going to lead. I was in a corner with three other men. I remember that one of them, a lank-faced pale man, said: “Where is all this going to end?”

  And then another man spoke. I liked the look of him the moment I set eyes on him. He was a small, dried-up man, with that air of sun-matured toughness, that appearance of teak-like hardness which you find in men who have lived rough and healthy lives in the tropics. He was wearing a well-preserved suit of old tweeds and an open-necked shirt. But these clothes hung upon him as if they did not belong to him. They say that clothes make the man. This, to a certain extent, is true: a military tunic is never really shaped to fit a soldier—a soldier is made to fit his tunic. And it was quite obvious that this little man had worn a uniform and conformed to an established way of carrying himself for many years. His hair was of a neutral tint somewhere between yellow and sandy white. He had a moustache which might have been a sprinkling of silver sand on his upper lip. He smoked a pipe, and had a certain bird-like way of cocking his head as he talked; and his tone was half-amiable and half-­authoritative—the tone of a man who has grown accustomed to combining threats with promises in ordering a platoon. He said this: “And who knows where anything in the world begins or ends? What do you mean by looking as if you’d lost a shilling and picked up a farthing just because you don’t know where every­thing is going to end?”

  About ten minutes later, easing himself into conversation like a foot into a shoe, he told us this story:

  When I was a nipper I knew everything. Yes, when I was about fifteen years old nobody could tell me anything at all. People didn’t tell me, I told them. That is ignorance. It’s like that that you stay ignorant. Well, I lived and learned. I lived a hell of a lot, and never learned very much. I’m sixty now, and I’ve only just begun to realise that the sum total of all I know is sweet Fanny Adams. This gentleman here was giving us a patter about not knowing where things end. Now look, I’ll tell you something.

  Years and years ago I was in China. I was a soldier there. I got most of my military experience there. I liked the Chinese, because I always found them a decent sort
of people; honest and hard-working, and in general clean in their personal habits. Never mind that for the moment. I was a private soldier then. One night I was on sentry duty, on a certain bridge over the Soochow Creek. There had been a lot of stealing going on. It had to be guarded against. There are good and bad of all sorts. There is no place in the world where you won’t get thieving. In this case, rifles and ammunition were sometimes getting stolen. Well, in every community there is a class that is willing to pay for fire-arms. I was on sentry-go. It was in the middle of the night and there was a damned great moon. I was pretty young, and it was all a bit new and ghostly. I had not been there more than an hour when I saw something move, and caught the glint of the moon on a bit of steel. I gave the challenge, and nobody answered. I gave it again, and the shadow started to run away. I ordered it to stop or I’d fire. It was a man. He panicked, and ran like the wind in the moonlight. I had my orders, and I ups with the old bundhook and fires, intending to hit him in the leg. But I was excited, and in a hurry. The man went down, and I went over to him. Instead of hitting him in the leg I’d hit him in the back and shot him straight through the heart. He must have died in a split second. I felt queer. This was the first man I ever killed. It didn’t feel nice. When I looked down, to see what he’d been stealing, I saw that all he had was a few pounds of old iron and a few bits of brass and copper, in a big tin can.

  I got a bit drunk, next, but I felt a bit conscience-stricken. The man had been some kind of a poor starving workman, and I dare say he had only tried to pinch a few farthings’ worth of scrap metal to buy a bit of rice for his kids. I didn’t feel much of a hero. But time passed, and I got married. I left the Army and left China. I went to Singapore. This was years and years later. I settled down in Singapore, and was very devoted to my wife. She was a nice girl. I got a job on a plantation, and did well. I got myself a servant; or I should say, that I got my wife a servant—a Chinese girl who, I don’t mind telling you, was the best servant anybody in the world could wish to have. In the first place, she was as loyal and faithful as somebody out of a fairy-story. She waited on my wife—who wasn’t very strong—hand and foot, and seemed to like doing so, because my wife was always kind to her and I don’t believe that she, poor girl, had had much kindness in her life. We did not have any kids at first, but after we had been married about five years my wife told me the glad news. She was going to have a kid, and I was in the seventh heaven. We were a long way from anywhere and I had made arrangements that, a reasonable time before the business was due to start, my wife should be taken to another place where there were women and doctors and everything.

  Well, when there was about another two months to go, I had to go, on very urgent business, a long way away. I left my wife in the care of the Chinese girl; but I did not feel very easy in my mind about it all. I had to be gone just over a week. When I got back the child was already born. It was a boy and he is thirty years old now, and more than six feet high, and strong as a buffalo. But he was born before his time, and he was one of those kids who, you would think, hasn’t got enough life in him to open his eyes. He was too weak to cry. My wife had had a terrible time. She would have died, I tell you that she would have died as sure as God made Heaven, if it had not been for the servant. Yes, this Chinese girl pulled off the whole affair. She handled my wife like silk or porcelain, and she fed the kid with a fountain-pen filler which I used for an old-fashioned pen I had. She played doctor, wet-nurse, midwife, and everything. And it is to her that I owe my wife’s life and that of my son, who is now a doctor.

  I had never really looked at her as a human being until then. We had never exchanged ten words, except in the form of orders given and taken. But now I began to talk to her, and asked her about herself. She told me that she was from China. Her father had been a poor working man who could not make ends meet. He was an honest man, she said, but one night, not wanting to see his children starve, he had tried to steal some scrap metal; but on a bridge over the Soochow Creek, an English sentry had shot him in the back. I asked her what sentry. She said: “I do not know. My brothers and my mother died of hunger, and I only live because I was a pretty girl, and a merchant took me away.”

  And you are talking to me about how things end or begin! Why, mug that you are, no man on earth knows the beginning or the end of anything that he does. The only thing you can do, pal, is what you think is right, and hope for the best.

  The Conqueror Worm

  I met Dempsey first in Stockholm. He was one of those pulpy personalities in which it is difficult to find anything definite. He was honest because he was afraid of the consequences of dishonesty; nobody quarrelled with him because he agreed with everything anybody said. His pale and insipid soul was dotted with silly little prejudices and principles, as feeble as the vestigial seeds of a banana. There was one particle which, hardened by pure fear, stuck in the middle of his brain—the fact that he had never done anything illegal. Other men base their pride on achievement or endurance: “I built a business,” “I survived the War.” Dempsey’s self-respect centred round the thought: “I have never done anything like that.” He stuck to me, like discarded chewing-gum to the sole of a boot, and would not be shaken off, until that memorable night when we found ourselves stranded in Nyevinossi-Novgorod.

  Oh, that town, that miserable ice-bound town of Nyevinossi-Novgorod! There are no lamps in its streets. Why should there be, since nobody goes out after dark? And who wants to go out, since there is nowhere to go? It is a coal town, clinging to the mouths of the Nyevinossi Pits; bi-sected by the line of the Arctic Circle, it skulks, freezing, under the slate-coloured sky of the Kola Peninsula—black with smoke, grey with fog, rasped by the icy teeth of the bitter White Sea; redolent of dead fish, and utterly permeated with gritty coal-dust. The streets twist and turn, as if they had writhed with cold before being frozen stiff by the wind—the paralysing wind of the Arctic, which carries with it the unbearable desolation of the northern wastes and the heart-breaking melancholy of the Eastern tundras.

  We were lost there. It was nearly midnight. Every window was dark, and the roads were treacherous.

  “We can get the ferry to Izbaborg at six in the morning,” I said.

  “But what are we going to do till then?” asked Dempsey.

  “Find lodging.”

  “But where?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. We’ll have to ask somebody.”

  “But we can’t speak a word of Russian——”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  I knocked at the nearest door, but nobody answered. You would have thought that the town was dead. We walked on. Wind began to whistle through the narrow, deserted street.

  “Somebody’s coming!” said Dempsey.

  A man was approaching, carrying a lantern. I called him: “Hoi!” He stopped, and we went up to him. As he held up the lantern to look at us, I caught a glimpse of his face. He was a Jew, very small, closely wrapped in a wolf-skin coat, with a fur cap pulled down over his ears. His face was as narrow as if it had been pressed between two boards; marked with small-pox, and contorted in an anxious, mechanical grin, such as you see on the face of a man squinting against strong sunlight. I addressed him in German:

  “Can you help us find a place to sleep?”

  He replied in Yiddish: “Sleep? Can you pay?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, there’s a hotel.”

  “Is there? Where?”

  “Well, you go straight along until you come to Batko’s; then turn to the left by the——”

  “But how can we find our way in the dark? We’re strangers here.”

  “Hum. All right. I’ll show you. You come with me.”

  “I don’t like the look of him,” whispered Dempsey.

  We followed the man with the lantern. The streets grew narrower, winding like snakes. We were lost in a maze of black tunnels, through which the rising wind rushed, roaring, flinging into our faces gritty fragments of ice. Dempsey took my arm, and clung to it. We
came to the deep centre of the town, to a street so narrow that two men could not have walked abreast through it. Our guide stopped at an ancient and filthy wooden house which leaned over at an angle of sixty degrees on to three huge wooden props, which alone prevented it from falling down.

  “Here you are, gentlemen! A hotel. Yak’s. It’s all right, I tell you!” The Jew knocked at the door.

  “We can’t go in here,” said Dempsey.

  “We’ve got to go somewhere,” I said.

  “I’d rather spend the night in the streets. I’ve got a feeling——”

  “Ssh!”

  The door swung open, and the entire opening was blocked by the immense bulk of a man. The light was behind him. We could see only his black silhouette. He stepped back.

  “Come in,” said our guide.

  I pushed Dempsey in front of me, into the house. The man closed the door, and then, as he turned and faced us, I started back and put my hand on my revolver. I have never seen such a man. His bulk, alone, was terrifying: stripped, he must have weighed twenty-two stone. His colossal torso was muffled in a great bearskin coat—he seemed larger than an elephant; yet even so, his head was too big for his body. His face appeared to have been twisted out of shape by some fantastic disease, until it bore a distinct resemblance to the head of a rhinoceros: it had the same scalloped mouth, bestial forehead, and ponderous jowl. His nose was smashed flat. An ancient scar, which must have laid open the whole left side of his face, twitched up a corner of his mouth in a perpetual snarl. His flat skull was covered with coarse white bristles, and under his lower lip hung a tuft like a shaving-brush. Our guide whispered to him: they both laughed. The anxious, grinning little face turned towards me, as he said: