by Gerald Kersh
… Out of this blackness; out of this nothingness; a Man emerges. He is stunned and shocked. He does not know who is or where he is. Parched with thirst he goes to a pond to drink and sees a face which is strange to him—a blank, plain, stunned face that belongs to a man of forty-five, beautifully dressed, and decorated with elegant jewellery. As he bends to drink something cuts him under the ribs. The blank-faced Man is puzzled: he thrusts a hand up his coat, unbuttons his waistcoat, drags up his shirt and uncovers a belt. In this packed canvas belt he finds amass of paper. What is this? He does not know. It is money, to the value of five million pounds. The stunned Man who has walked so far has no idea of the meaning of this paper. He drinks greedily from the pond (from the other side of the pond two anxious cows, also drinking, look at him with great melancholy eyes). The Man looks back at the cows. He is full of a strange uneasiness. Then he goes to the road, instinctively, and walks—he does not know, nor does he care, where he is walking. At last an old gentleman, a man of intrinsic sweetness, travelling up or down this unknown road in a trap, stops and offers him a lift….
… The Man is lost, bewildered. He does not know who he is or where he is. Where is he going? He is not quite sure … Where has he come from? He is not certain … The old gentleman in the trap is a Doctor, returning from a visit to a patient in an outlying farm. The doctor observes the grazed bruise on the Man’s forehead, and the torn and bloodied condition of his clothes. Has the Man had an accident? The Man does not know. Where was the man a few minutes ago?—The man does not know. The old Doctor takes the man to his house, bathes his wounds, feeds him, and gives him something that makes him go to sleep.
After a sleep full of turbulent dreams the Man goes back with the Doctor to where the Doctor picked him up on the road. Going back, landmark by landmark, he remembers what has happened between the Doctor’s bedroom and the passing of the trap.
… Thereupon, of course, the Doctor taking charge of the packed money-belt of the Man whose memory is lost, tries to take him back—back and back up the roads down which he was driving. A pattern becomes visible, as in a length of wallpaper let loose. Clue by clue they trace the Man’s career backwards, point by point. He is confronted with evil after evil. Here is the child he ill-treated in This Town … There is the woman he betrayed in That Town….
… In This Hotel he slept with a girl he betrayed … In That Hotel he destroyed the reputation of a married woman, wantonly sliding away before dawn. Always his pockets were full of money. Always, he was never quite undressed because there was a great canvas belt full of Bearer Bonds.
… The Doctor has become great and terrible. At X the Man wants to stop. But no, he may not. He must go on. He, the lost soul, must find himself. He must go on and on down this dreadful road. But the Man is afraid. The road unrolls like a scroll, uncovering horror after horror. “I don’t want to see any more of myself!” the Man cries.
One night, while the Doctor is asleep, he takes his money-belt and runs away. Alone in the dark he is tortured by raging curiosity. No, there is no escape. He returns to the hotel, and the Doctor, with a friendly smile, says: “I was expecting you earlier.”
“I was running away.”
With a kind smile the Doctor says: “Come, friend, let us be on our road.”
Again, at a certain desolate crossroads, remembering the memory of a sin over which he chuckled when he passed that way before, the Man recoils and cries: “No! No! I can’t go on! I won’t go on! Let me go!”
“On, brother, on to the bitter end,” says the Doctor.
Inexorably the great grey Scroll unrolls as the two men go on into the mist which clears in front of them and closes behind them, and the Man, step by step, is forced to look upon things that make his soul sick. Into his clean-scraped mind come memories of things recollected, recollections of emotions; lurid, abominable images of himself. “This was not me—this could not possibly have been me!” he cries, weeping.
“Oh, son,” says the Doctor; and the Man, throwing himself backwards in a blind panic, finds that the light touch of the surgically-scoured hand in the old-fashioned starched cuff stops him like a stone wall.
He must go on. And he knows that as he goes on the Scroll will reveal more loathsome things. He tries to run away again, one bitterly cold evening, when, passing through a sad little town, a fog comes down upon them. He runs blindly … and when the fog drifts away at dawn he is back where he started, and the Doctor is saying: “Just in time, old friend. Let us be on our way.”
And the Scroll unrolls until it is no thicker than a pencil; and the Man is appalled by the monstrousness of himself. He is sick with loathing when he looks at himself. He hates himself so bitterly that he wants to take himself by the throat and murder himself—hang himself as the vilest of men, bury himself deep in a lonely place, shovel dirt upon himself, let the coarse moorland grass grow over himself so that he may be forever forgotten.
“If this was me—my God, how I’d despise myself! I would not have such a man in the same room with me,” he says.
“This was you, brother,” says the Doctor. “Come on, son. We have not all the time in the world, friend. Forward, comrade.”
The Man looks at the clouded radiance that comes before the blaze of pitiless black-and-white light-and-shadow ahead. He looks back at the thick woolly mist and yearns towards it as a man dying of cold yearns towards a blanket. But he bows his head and goes on with the Doctor; the last curl of the Scroll is smoothed out and flattened down and, in clear black and cold white, shocked like a man caught unawares by a photographer’s flash, the Man is revealed to himself.
He is where he started. Now he remembers. He is Oliver Rudge, blackmailer and embezzler.
“Give me back my belt,” he says. The Doctor gives him his belt. They are standing in the blue light of a lamp outside a police station. The Man asks: “What was I, for God’s sake? A devil?”
“Yes, my son, you were a devil, and you were also a soul in torment.”
“But it was like looking at a peep-show of Hell.”
“Of purgatory,” says the Doctor.
The Man smiles. He says good-bye, gripping the Doctor’s hand … And then he finds that he is holding nothing but a handful of mist. But he walks firmly under the lamp, up the three wet stone steps, past the big middle-aged policeman at the door, and goes to the inspector’s desk. He puts down the canvas bag and says: “I am Oliver Rudge.” … And so, at peace with himself, he goes down a cold stairway. The light from the naked bulb catches his dishevelled hair, which, beaded with moisture from the mist, looks for a moment like a halo. Radiant, he goes into his cell and the iron door closes.
*
A story like that, thought Pym, could involve all mankind. It could—it should—be a stupendous thing, with a background as long as the horizon and as wide as the sky.
And that would give her something to think about.
Pym remembered certain early experiments in elementary inorganic chemistry. Potassium chlorate, heated in a test-tube, gave out oxygen. You put a little potassium chlorate in the tube and heated it. When it began to melt you thrust a smouldering splinter into the mouth of the tube. The splinter, somewhat reluctantly, became incandescent and caught fire. But if you mixed a little black oxide of manganese with your potassium chlorate the oxygen was liberated in a great gasp and the glowing splinter popped into blinding flame. Yet analysis demonstrated that the black oxide of manganese was unchanged, although in some mysterious way it hastened and intensified the comparatively sluggish reaction of the other chemical.
Joanna Bowman had provided the black pinch of catalytic anger, and Pym was alight.
He would wring a little grudging admiration from that intolerable woman if he burnt to ashes in the attempt.
It was too late to go to bed: day would break in an hour. Pym sharpened a pencil and began to make notes.
At nine o’clock he went out and called upon an estate agent near Piccadilly, who told him that there wa
s a furnished flat in Battersea—a bed-sitting-room, kitchenette and bathroom—to let at thirty-five shillings a week.
“I can give you an order to view——”
“—It doesn’t matter. You say there’s a bed-sitting-room? A kitchenette and a bath? The place, you tell me, is furnished?”
“Oh, yes. Plate and linen.”
“Thirty-five shillings a week you say? How do I pay it?”
“Monthly.”
“That would be seven pounds a month.”
“That’s right, sir: payable in advance.”
Pym put down seven pounds and said: “Well, all right, I’ll take it.”
“Don’t you think you’d better look at it first?”
“No need at all. When can I move in?”
“Whenever you like.”
“In that case, I’ll move in to-night.”
“There are certain formalities. It is customary to take up references….”
“Well, if you want references there’s Mr. Steeple, Features Editor of the Sunday Special, and Mr. Proudfoot, a director of Thurtell Hunt, Mayerling & Company. Will they be sufficient?’
“Quite sufficient.”
“Well, look. Here’s the month’s rent, and I’ll ring you a little later in the day. They have pots, pans, and all that sort of thing?”
“I think so, yes. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather view the place first?”
“No,” said Pym, “I’m prepared to take your word for it. If you say it’s all right, that’s all right. What do I do? Do I give you the money now?”
“Thank you, sir,” said the estate agent, “I think it would be just as well, if you don’t mind. But really, hadn’t you better have a look at it?”
“No need, no need. A place is a place,” said Pym. “Go ahead.”
“There’s likely to be a delay of two or three days, you know, while we take up references. I suppose that’s all right?”
“Oh, quite all right. You get in touch with me, I suppose. Pym. P-Y-M, care of Steeple, the Sunday Special. And my address will be 35, Leopold Crescent, Battersea—is that right?”
The agent was uneasy. He said: “You mustn’t blame me if it doesn’t quite suit, sir.”
“I’ll blame nobody,” said Pym. “I’ve no time to bother.”
“Very good, sir.”
As the door closed behind Pym the agent telephoned Steeple at the Sunday Special. Steeple said: “Mr. Pym? Don’t worry about him. He’s all right.”
Proudfoot said: “My dear sir, I have not the slightest hesitation in assuring you that Mr. Pym is in every way a thoughly desirable tenant. I have known him since his infancy. You need have no hesitation in recommending him strongly to your client.”
They both knew that this kind of reference left them free of obligation. It cost nothing, and made them feel good.
*
Pym took Dr. Weissensee’s typescript out of his wardrobe and walked slowly to Proudfoot’s office. At the corner of the street he paused, smoked a cigarette, and walked away again. He drank three cups of coffee before he found courage to go on, and then he threw himself rather than walked into Thurtell Hunt, Mayerling & Co. and said to Joanna Bowman:
“I want to see Proudfoot.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Pym, I’m afraid you’ll have to wait,” she said. “Mr. Proudfoot is engaged.”
“Oh, I see. Engaged. Engaged for long?”
“I couldn’t say. Mr. Proudfoot is with a lady.”
“I wonder if you would mind telling Mr. Proudfoot that I am here?” said Pym.
“Not at all.”
She opened a door and disappeared; opened it again, came back, and said: “Would you like to go in?”
“Oh, by the way,” said Pym, “it begins to occur to me that I am by way of falling in love with you. What do you say to that?”
“Pym, don’t be stupid—go in.”
Pym went into Proudfoot’s office. Dr. Weissensee was there, and she looked old and unhappy.
“Well, my dear fellow?” said Proudfoot.
After a pause Pym said: “Proudfoot. I’m sorry, but no. No, Proudfoot, I can’t do it. I don’t like it, and I can’t do it. You’ve got to forgive me, Proudfoot, but it isn’t possible.”
“My dear fellow, my dear Pym; I beg your pardon—what isn’t possible? What can’t you do?”
Pym pointed to the folder under his arm and said: “This.”
“Do I understand that you cannot put Dr. Weissensee’s opus into clear English?”
“You must excuse me, Proudfoot, but I can’t.”
“But why not?”
Pym looked at Dr. Weissensee, and he looked at Proudfoot, and shrugged his shoulders and said: “I’m sorry, Proudfoot.”
“Let us go into this,” said Proudfoot.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
HE put his brand new respectable black elbows on the edge of the brand new desk, and carefully placed the fingertips of his right hand on the fingertips of his left until he had made a little triangle. Pym observed two things: Proudfoot had been manicured; and Proudfoot had already taken three or four strong drinks.
Proudfoot saw that Pym was nervous, anxious and miserable. Very deliberately Proudfoot waited, looking at him patiently, but reproachfully. Nearly half a minute passed while he shook his head very sadly, sighed, and assumed the dejected air of a man whose last illusion has been blown away, and who cannot even try to put on a bold front. His mouth drooped, his face sagged; his forehead broke itself into furrows as his eyebrows went up over his nose and down at the corners of his eyes. “I was relying on you, Johnny,” he said. “I’m very sorry indeed to hear you talk like this, old friend. A good deal depends on you, you see. In point of fact, my dear fellow, a great deal depends on you, now, as far as I am concerned. You see, Johnny, Mr. Sherwood has some little faith in me, and that faith is partly founded on assurances which, in their turn, had their foundation in the faith I had in you. Sic transit gloria mundi! Poor me. How strange it is,” said Proudfoot, with a broken laugh, “how strange it is! Like flies to wanton boys are we to the gods—they slay us for their sport. Yes, Johnny, leg by leg and wing by wing they pull us to pieces. Or you might say that as mice to tired cats are we to Fate. It plays with us—it lets us go only to catch us again. Ah, Johnny Pym, Johnny Pym! Did you ever read a story by Joras Karl Huysmans, a story entitled The Torture of Hope? It is a very good story—horrible, but very good. One day, when you have time, you must read it.”
“I’ve read it,” said Pym heavily.
“You remember, then,” said Proudfoot.
“I don’t know what you mean,” said Pym.
“Never mind, Johnny. Forget it. Banish it from your mind. We are still good friends, I hope?”
“My dear Proudfoot, try and understand this little thing. You understand so much. Understand this. I can’t rewrite this book for you. It’s a filthy book. I hate it. I couldn’t look myself in the face again if I did what you wanted me to do. Anything but that, yes. But I simply can’t help you to put that book out.”
He had forgotten that Dr. Weissensee was in the office. She rose, buzzing like a blow-fly, and said: “Vat do you mean, please? Tell me, vat is it that you are saying?”
Before Pym could reply, Proudfoot said: “Oh, nothing, nothing, Doctor. For the moment Mr. Pym does not altogether approve of your book.”
“Book? Book? It is more than a book. These are facts, of life the facts! You too! It is truth you do not like, murderer!”
“Put it that way if you like,” said Pym.
Turning to Proudfoot Dr. Weissensee screamed: “Liar! You tell me this is a good man! Liar! Thief! You make conspiracy vid this one, yes? So. So it is. But you shall not! I vill not! I——”
“Dr. Weissensee,” said Pym, “please try and understand me also. You’re a psychologist, and you surely must be able to understand.”
“I understand that you are laughing at me.”
Pym said: “Listen, Dr. Weissensee. If I don’t want to
rewrite your book, why should I? I am a free man, and this is a free country. You must understand that surely?”
“Now you laugh at me. Free, free, free, free, free! To me, you say free! To me, I should have liberated, made free, gone into exile! Me who give myself for freedom—for this.” She beat her hands on the folder that contained her typescript. “And this, my last hope! I am old, I am not vell. I have a little malignant growth down here and this little boy, he makes vid a finger at the vork of my life, and he laughs at me. Let me die.”
Proudfoot’s face was rigid but his eyes were flickering like voltmeters. He said nothing. Pym continued: “I can’t rewrite your book myself. I’m not capable. If I can’t I can’t, Dr. Weissensee.” He spoke firmly, but when he saw a tear upon the preposterous little woman’s ugly face his will wobbled like a broken chair, and he went on: “But if you like I’ll find someone else for you who will write it much better than I could.”
Now Proudfoot cleared his throat and said:
“Pardon my obtuseness, my dear fellow, but I do not quite see what the Germans call the Inwardness of your morality. Let us take a hypothetical case. Let us assume for a moment that I am … let us say a physician and surgeon. You, let us say, are a young woman who has got into trouble and happens to be pregnant. You say to me: ‘It is out of the question for me to bear the child of this unknown father because my papa is the Archbishop of Kent and my mother is the daughter of the Bishop of Chelsea. Will you be so good as to procure me an abortion?’ And I say: ‘My dear Miss Muffet, in no circumstances will I abort you. Abortion is evil. I disapprove profoundly of abortion, which I regard as a species of murder—in short, a criminal act. I would cut my hand off before putting it to such an improper use. I will not do what you ask me to do because what you ask me to do is utterly detestable to me. The very thought of it repels me. I am sorry for you, but my word stands. I disapprove of abortion on principle. But go next door to Dr. So-and-So, and give him my card, and he will do whatever you ask, at a cut price.’ My dear fellow, what an extraordinary fellow you are!”
