by Gerald Kersh
The missionary glanced from face to face, saw Pym’s compressed mouth and terrified eyes and said: “What brings you here?”
“Drunk,” said Pym.
“Feel pretty sick and sorry for yourself?”
“Yes.”
“Well, try not to be so silly another time, will you?”
“Yes.”
“That’s right, that’s right. Is it worth it?”
“No, no—no!”
The missionary said: “Um …” and went to another man—a thickset, broken-faced young assaulter, who said: “Yer—’ere again, that’s right, ’ere again. Mind your own business. Lea’ me alone. Scram!”
An untidy, insinuating man who might have weighed a hundred pounds took the missionary by the sleeve and cried: “Your Reverence—a lady give me a bag to ’old, a crocodile bag. ‘’Old it for me—you got a honest face,’ she says——”
“You again, Thomas. The same old story?”
“Well…”
At Pym’s shoulder a voice of light music said:
“Base, sinister, scurvy, foul, gross and felonious—
Flagitious, atrocious, incarnate, accursed!”
Pym turned and looked into the eyes of a stout grey man in a decent dark-brown suit: a keen-eyed elderly man with a bloodhound face and cropped white hair.
“Malevolent, heartless and lost in iniquity
Indefensible, culpable, past praying for …
Ah! Thank God for poetry. Thank God for it!…
Looseness of morals, obliquity, infamy,
Hardness of heart and corruption—depravity——
Fleshly infirmity, sink of iniquity,
Take the wrong course, son, and sow your wild oats!
Does that convey anything to you?”
“That really is very good indeed. Who is the author?” said Pym.
“Oh, our vices, wrong-doing, iniquity, wickedness,
Laxity, scandal, offending old Adam——”
The stout man declaimed these lines in a heroic baritone, but he watched Pym in a sly, sidelong way. Pym saw that he had beautiful little tapering hands—like the hands of the Mona Lisa in Busto’s lithograph, astonishingly clean in spite of everything. Indeed, although the stout man must have spent the night in a cell, he had the crisp, brisk, contented air of a gentleman with a clear conscience who has bathed and dressed at his leisure after a refreshing sleep.
“Perhaps it strikes you as familiar?” he said.
“Yes, it does. Who wrote it?”
“Ah!” the stout man said, with a delighted chuckle. “It has a certain something? It rolls off the tongue? It has resonance, eh? One dabbles, one dabbles. I knew that you were a literary man the moment I set eyes on you.”
Pym expressed astonishment and said, with considerable bitterness: “Literary man! A fine literary man! Look at me!” He had lost his hat, and his trousers, freshly torn, were covered with mud. The grazed knuckles of his left hand were dark with dried blood and he had to tilt his head like an apoplectic in order to see out of his blackened eye. His tongue was dry sackcloth in a mouth full of ashes. “A literary man!” he repeated with a cindery cough.
“Why not? Why not?” said the stout man; and now he used his voice as a masseur uses aromatic ointment to take away a pain in the neck. “Why not a literary man? It was perfectly obvious to me at a glance that you weren’t one of these…” His left hand described a smooth figure-of-eight. “It is not necessary for a literary man to maintain a conventional appearance. A literary man, my dear fellow, is the freest creature on earth, and whatever he does is right. He may strut in a laced coat like Oliver Goldsmith, wallow in snuff like Dr. Johnson, or array himself like a perfect gentleman in the manner of Lord Macaulay. He is not bound by the chains of convention that fetter us businessmen. I am a businessman, although I try to dabble in higher things. Don’t look at yourself so disparagingly. It happens to us all. One escapes, so to speak, from the bitter realities of life for one indiscreet little evening. I know—you writers are so sensitive: you feel too much and too deeply. I take it,” he said, exploring Pym’s face with his bright, quick eyes, “that this is your first visit to this place, and that last night you fell among … friends?”
“Yes. And you?”
“Oh, me? Allow me, by the way, to introduce myself. My name is Thomas Paine Sherwood. How do you do?”
“John Pym. How do you do?”
Mr. Sherwood laughed heartily. “My father, as you may have guessed, was a Freethinker and a believer in the Rights of Man, Mr. Pym. I was named after his hero.”
“I hope you’re not here for anything serious,” said Pym.
Mr. Sherwood laughed heartily and said: “Indeed I am not. It’s so absurd that it’s scarcely worth mentioning. Quite simply—there’s nothing to conceal—I arrived in Town yesterday from the Continent and went to the Hotel Masefield. It’s a quiet hotel, as I daresay you know—nothing lavish, but solid and good. Full of stuffy old dowagers and apoplectic admirals, but thoroughly reliable and comfortable. But, of course, you know the place—the Masefield, St. James’s. I am known there—or I should say now that I used to be known there. The hotel changed hands three or four years ago. Marcantonio, the manager, seems to have been susperseded by another man—some Swiss or other—and even the head porter is new. To put it in a nutshell—because I rather fancy your call is coming soon—I assumed that I was well enough known there not to need to reserve a room. So I went straight to the Masefield and told the people at the station to have my luggage sent on, so that I arrived empty-handed, asked for Marcantonio, was told he’d left, asked for a room, was asked to wait, and waited. They kept me waiting more than twenty minutes. I had all sorts of things to think of, so I didn’t mind that for the first ten minutes or so. I checked over a list of commitments in an engagement book, and made things clear for myself in the next forty-eight hours—in short, I was thoroughly preoccupied. Now this will strike you as utterly ridiculous. When I travel on the Continent I have the habit of keeping with me at all times a pigskin dressing-case with silver fittings. Over there they are not anything like as reliable as they are here. Once, for instance, in Barcelona, I found myself without the raw material for a civilised toilet for more than three days. That was in 1928. Ever since then I have made a practice of keeping my dressing-case with me. On this occasion—feeling that I was at home—I left my dressing-case to be sent on. Everybody concerned swore that all my luggage would be at the Masefield within the hour. But, as I was saying, I lost patience after a quarter of an hour or so, told the receptionist what I thought of the new order of things in the Hotel Masefield and walked out.
“And this is the ridiculous part of it!—Without thinking, I picked up a pigskin-and-silver dressing-case, out of sheer force of habit, since I had been accustomed to the feel of a pigskin-and-silver dressing-case in my hand for so long. Incidentally, my pigskin-and-silver dressing-case was expecially made with a compartment for papers. Well, to cut it short, I was stopped while I was stamping indignantly out of the Masefield and, as God is my Judge, given in charge for trying to make off—of all things—with a pigskin-and-silver dressing-case (a damned inferior one) the property of Major-General Hoskins, whoever he may be!
“And it’s all my fault. Yes, it is. Because it has since occurred to me that I must have misdirected my own luggage. I have a sprawling, loose, hurried way of writing, and ought to have written the name of the hotel in block letters. But I wrote it in longhand, and I will wager any sum within reason that they sent my luggage to the Hotel Hirschfield instead of the Masefield. There you have the whole story of my crime. And speaking of hotels, Mr. Pym, where do you live?”
“Care of the Sunday Special will always get me … Ah-ah!—this is it!”
Pym felt that his bladder had risen into his throat, and that his uvula was beating upon it like a stick on a wet drum. He went into Court and was charged with being drunk and incapable.
“Were you drunk?” they asked him.
“Were you drunk?”
“I am afraid I was.”
“Has he any money?”
“Thirty-nine shillings in silver and one shilling and twopence-halfpenny in bronze, sir.”
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Fined ten shillings. Next.”
Pym walked out like a somnambulist. “You mean, I simply pay ten shillings and then I can go away?” he asked, incredulously.
A colossal unhelmeted policeman said: “Unless you want to come and live with us.”
Another policeman in the doorway, looking stolidly to his front, flicked Pym a knowing wink with one eyelash. A raddled woman from whose face dried paint and powder were falling in little flakes, smiled at him, uncovering teeth like mildewed fragments of cheese.
Pym ran away. In Long Acre he found a taxi and—muddy and bruised, bloody and tattered, sore and humiliated—returned to Busto’s.
Busto focused his deadly old eyes upon him and said: “Aha! Aha! Youra girl friend. On danger list. Horsapidle says you go if you wanna go any time you like. Okay?”
“Danger list? Girl friend? What girl friend? Do you mean Miss Joyce?”
“No—Mrs. Greensleeve, what caught alight,” said Busto. “She been, she gone, she done it! Foolish woman.”
“Why pick on me?” said Pym.
“I dunno, I don’t care, I dowanna know,” said Busto. “She ask for you: they send. None of my business.”
“When did the message come?”
“Just now. Oh yes, I forgot—they bringa this for you,” said Busto, fishing an envelope from under the tails of his coat.
Ten minutes of contact with Busto were enough to make the envelope look and smell as if he had been wearing it next to his skin for six weeks. Pym took out a little sheet of notepaper with the letter-heading of the Lazarus Infirmary. He recognised Mrs. Greensleeve’s handwriting: the cramped, spikey writing of an impoverished gentlewoman to whom paper is money; who makes a pen-nib last a long time, and has to think twice before spending twopence on a bottle of ink. He read:
I must speak to you please come quickly.
M. Greensleeve.
She had tried to sign her name with a flourish, but the flourish had gone awry so that it reminded Pym of the distorted lower lip of a crying child.
“Hah!” said Busto, and shuffled away into his musty darkness below stairs.
Pym went to his room to wash, but when he saw himself in his sixpenny shaving-mirror he cried: “Christ!” again and shut his eyes. Then he examined himself as well as he could, fitting eyeful to eyeful of oblong reflection, and threw the mirror into the fireplace. It broke. “Another seven years’ bad luck,” he said.
He took his hoarded twenty-five pounds from between pages 385 and 386 of his typescript, and went out again.
CHAPTER SIX
YOU must dress before you can be dressed. Who dares to come, in filthy rags, into the presence of a tailor? First, Pym went to a barber’s shop—the dirtiest he could find, since he hated to be conspicuous. Then—ragged, but smelling of brilliantine—he bought a white shirt for seven-and-sixpence and a pair of green socks for eighteenpence: one cannot try on even a fifty-shilling suit in a dirty shirt, and who is so lost to decency that he will uncover the nakedness of his toes to a salesman in a shoe shop?
Pym put on his new shirt and socks in a public lavatory, leaving the old ones in a neat bundle on top of the cistern. Now he felt better; he could even thank God for his hungry leanness, that made of his shoulders a hanger which any coat might fit.
Intoxicated by the caress of clean linen, he walked past the fifty-shilling place and confidently confronted a pushing individual who hung his shop window with autographed portraits of celebrities. The smell of new clothes stung Pym’s nostrils like spice: for one mad moment he lusted after a sportsmanlike double-breasted dog-tooth red-and-grey check suit as worn by the Lightweight Champion. He tickled the padded shoulder of a white tweed sports-coat, and stroked the back of a jacket which, the shopkeeper assured him, was as worn by Lord Lonsdale. There was a zigzag pattern in three distinct shades of brown that caught his eye; another fascinated him because it was like the Fire-and-Smoke-of-Navarino that Chichikov bought after he swindled Kholobuev. In the end he decided on something discreetly grey, calculated not to show the dirt. The shopkeeper assured him that his was a favourite colour of Sir Edward Marshall Hall.
“Where shall I send it, sir?” he asked, as if he did not know.
“I’ll wear it now.”
“And the other suit, sir?”
“Keep it until I call for it.”
After that, unashamed, almost arrogant, Pym put his stockinged foot on a stool in a shoe shop and paid seventeen shillings for a pair of black shoes.
Then he bought two ninepenny handkerchiefs for himself, ten-shillingsworth of black grapes for Mrs. Greensleeve, and went to the Lazarus Infirmary in a taxi.
The road was bad. The jolting of the taxi reminded Pym that his head ached and that there was a bad taste in his mouth. The infirmary was built of the French-mustard-coloured bricks that they used in the ’80’s for workhouses and barracks. It was blackened by the smoke of a railway junction—grim, disheartening, expressionless, cold as charity. The taxi paused, trembling, at the main entrance. The driver looked sourly at his fare, knocked up his flag with a vicious upper-cut and drove away. Pym pushed open two great glass doors. The smell of the lobby made him gulp, while his memory threw up the image of a cruel little widow who had been his nurse twenty-five years ago: she shone with cleanness and washed her hands with carbolic soap ten times a day as if she was aware of a bad smell that she wanted to conceal. He hated her: she frightened him with her furtive glancings and scourings. What guilt was she scrubbing from her fingers, this Lady Macbeth of the Lavatory?
“I have come to see Mrs. Greensleeve, the lady who was brought here yesterday—the lady who burnt herself,” said Pym.
“Billing’s Ward.”
*
In Billing’s Ward Mrs. Greensleeve lay perfectly still. She was bandaged so that she resembled a mummy, partly unwrapped. A chin and a sticky-looking blue eye were visible, stained with bright yellow. An undamaged hand—a skein of blue-black veins and a ladylike débris of sucked chicken-bone in a cracked membrane—rested on a cushion. They had given her something to keep her quiet. The drug was working. As the needle had gone into her arm the pain had gone away in big ripples, so that she was full of a sweet, pleasantly-throbbing calm. Through that hollow needle the gentleman in the white coat had squirted grateful peace … she had felt it creeping up the big vein like mercury in a thermometer as the warmth soaked in. It settled in a placid pool somewhere near her heart, and sent easy-going tributaries away from there into her head.
Now Mrs. Greensleeve, who knew that she was going to die, thought of death in the same way as a nightbound wanderer in the rain looks forward to a soft bed.
When Pym put the grapes on the table by the bed she beat a feeble tatto with her undamaged hand. She had been drowsing on the edge of a wonderful sleep. Mrs. Greensleeve still suffered: she was not dead yet. She could even talk. Following her beckoning finger, Pym stooped until his ear was a few inches from where her mouth was hidden under lint and bandages. Green screens enclosed the bed. Beyond the screen a woman was calling for a nurse. From another bed came a curiously melodious moaning. Brisk heels rang and reverberated in the corridor. An interminable goods train rattled and gasped out of the junction and in the distance an engine blew its whistle three times, very deliberately, as an owl hoots. From the street came a melancholy concert of horns: a taxi-driver, punching a rubber bulb, set up a lugubrious honking that made Pym think of wild geese over a desolate fen; a klaxon sounded and an effeminate little horn, with four distinct notes, cried plaintively. Now! the taxi-driver’s horn seemed to say; and then they all honked and cried and roared together. A man shouted. A motor-cycle stopped, impatiently thudding.
Mrs. Greensleeve’s whis
per found its way through the bandages, and under the noise, as fog finds its way through the crack under a door.
She said: “Thank you for coming. I am so ashamed. Can you hear me?”
“Perfectly. I brought you some grapes, Mrs. Greensleeve. You must eat them all up and you’ll be better soon.”
“How kind of you. I haven’t had a grape for six years. I’m afraid I shan’t be able to eat them. No, no more grapes. I’m afraid I’m a dead woman, Mr. Pym.”
“Oh no, don’t say that, Mrs. Greensleeve! Should you talk? Oughtn’t you to rest?”
“As Carlyle said … ‘shall I not have all eternity to rest in?’ Excuse me. A foolish old woman—a selfish old woman. I have no right to do it—to take you away from your work.” She whispered the word “work” with reverence, giving it a whole breath. “I often sat listening to you at your typewriter. I am a writer myself … that is why I appealed to you. There is a freemasonry in the Craft. The Craft … the Craft….
“… I never was a crafty woman. I was not crafty enough. Couldn’t I have deceived Greensleeve? But did I? I did not, I did not. ‘You, Mary, the wife of a man in my position—you of all women to give way to this blind infatuation! … Love, you say? Do you dare to say so? Your love is for your husband—your children! This is lust—filthy lust! You will end in the gutter, diseased, and be buried in a pauper’s grave …’” Her lint-muffled ghost of a whisper sounded different as she said this: she managed to inflate the shadow of a voice and made it round and bulky. She went on dreamily: “Fool! Fool! Canonical fool! If Harold Nero wasn’t love … if I had been nothing but a little lustful woman … Stronger than honour, stronger than my children. Lust? True love, true love, true love! ‘Oh, how beautiful you are!’ … How beautifully he said it! Lust! To say that of me! Not lust enough, dear God, not enough lust! … Poor Nero … dear Nero, so patient until … Poor him; poor me … poor Greensleeve. Sometimes an Anglican canon is given the gift of prophecy. Pauper’s grave!…”
Pym’s neck was aching. He said: “You must relax, Mrs. Greensleeve, and take things easy.”
