The Great Wash

by Gerald Kersh

  “In fact, it gives me the creeps,” said George Oaks, shivering so that his glass rattled against his teeth; and I noticed that his face was wet with sweat. “I must be getting old, Albert. I can’t take it the way I used to. I’ve half a mind to spend the night over at the Hither Valley Hotel, if you don’t mind.”

  “If you do, I’ll come with you,” I said. “George, you don’t look well.”

  “It’s nothing, it’ll pass,” said he. “But what about the belt, and all Monty’s other stuff? . . . Constable, we’ve got our friend’s money-belt, wallet and papers here. I believe there’s a considerable sum of money in the belt. Will you assume responsibility for it, or shall I ask Mr. Syd at the Hither Valley to lock it in his safe for the night?”

  “I think that would be just as well,” said the constable. “I’ll run it over there on my bike now, if you like. You can’t be too careful now that the gyppos are in. They got three of Mrs. Chinn’s pullets last night. I’ll do that, then, sir.”

  “Cello’s car will be safe enough in my garage, and his bags will be all right locked in his room until tomorrow,” I said.

  “Right you are, sir,” said the constable. “Good day, gentlemen.” He took the belt, the wallet, and the passport, and strode out.

  Chatterton said: “These things can be upsetting, can’t they? If you feel like a change of atmosphere for the night, I’m sure Oversmith could put you up. Eh, Oversmith?”

  “Why, yes, of course I could,” said Sir Peter, but when Oaks said that he couldn’t dream of it, the old man grunted: “Well, all right, see you at the Inquest, I daresay. Plain case of accidental death. Say ‘Good afternoon’ to a fellow, and he falls headlong down the blasted well. Cut-and-dried case of Death by Misadventure. ’Bye.”

  “So long, and thanks ever so much for the drinks,” said Major Chatterton. “Be seeing you.” When I had seen them out, I rushed to the fireplace.

  “Calm, calm,” said George Oaks, “as I guessed, the twigs have burnt out, and our stuff’s safe. Now, send the old lady home and tell her to take the day off tomorrow. Tell her we’ll be with Mr. Syd down at the Hither Valley.”

  I said: “All right. But tell me, are you out of your mind? What the devil was the idea of putting on that act for Chatterton? If there’s a grain of truth in Monty Cello’s story, don’t you see what you’ve done?”

  “Yes. I’ve put Chatterton on our trail, that’s what I’ve done, Albert.”

  “But why?”

  George Oaks chanted: “For I ha’e dreamed a dreary dream, beyond the Isle of Skye . . . I ha’e seen a dead man win a fight, and I think that man was I . . .”

  “George, I’m tired of playing this game in the dark. Tell me what’s in your mind.”

  “I will, tomorrow, I promise,” said Oaks. “Patience, and shuffle the cards!”

  “Why not put the papers into the proper hands, and have done with it?”

  “Because I can’t tell you what I have in mind until I know something of the contents of those papers, don’t you see? And if I so much as hint at what I believe to Scotland Yard, they’ll tell me to go and get my head examined. Bear with me, Albert, my heart is in the well there, with Monty Cello, and I must pause ’till it comes back to me.” He passed a hand over his forehead, and drew it away dripping wet.

  “George, for God’s sake, what’s the matter?”

  “To tell you the truth, Albert, I’m afraid. Horribly afraid!”

  “I don’t believe you,” I said; for George Oaks and Fear were incompatible. Yet there was something in his face that froze the blood in my heart.

  “Believe me, Albert—horribly afraid!”

  “Of Chatterton? Of atom-bombs?” I asked. “Oh, come, my dear George!”

  “No, Albert, I am afraid of something beyond reason and out of this world. Let’s get out into the open air, and I’ll tell you something.”

  Part Five

  Now what could there be, in or out of this world, that had the power to make George Oaks afraid? Life? No; as he once said to me: “I used to be passionately in love with Life when I was young and foolish, Albert, and then I was terribly jealous of her, and frightened to death of losing her. But after I had lived with her and given her everything I had—worn myself out trying to keep her—and she threatened to leave me, I found myself indifferent to her. Whereupon she grew jealous of me and clung to me, complaining that I’d die without her. She was trying to come it over me with pity, you understand. So I gave her a good smack in the face and told her that, much as I loved her, I’d see myself dead and damned before I let her humiliate me. So she blinked in a shocked kind of way, smiled again as she used to smile in the old days—only with more restraint, showing fewer teeth—and told me that without George Oaks she would be nothing at all, a mere wandering itch without direction. So we agreed to be faithful to each other until our dying day.

  “As for Death, I have yet to be confronted with convincing evidence of his existence,” said George Oaks; and went on to quote A. E. Housman: “. . . Every mother’s son travails with a skeleton,” and John Donne’s Death Be Not Proud. “Calm, calm, Albert; I have been dead and buried and resurrected, and I can tell you for a fact: Fear is hollow in the centre and around it is Nothing, as they say in Slovenia.”

  He had come out of the First World War with a Military Cross, a D.S.O., and something like a post-dated death certificate, having been grievously wounded and burnt in the lungs with mustard gas: the doctors gave him six months to live in 1918. Referring to this, I have heard him say: “Yes, they more or less said to me, ‘Captain Oaks, if, before the end of the year, the office-boy comes in and tells you that there is an Old Gentleman, wearing no flesh on his bones and carrying a sharp scythe, who insists on seeing you immediately, do not be a bit surprised.’ It struck me then that the time had come to make a little money and have a good time, so I bought some cylinders of cyanide gas from the Government and went into the rat extermination business in the seaports. And here I am, right as rain.” He laughed the Old Gentleman out of countenance. He would not say for what acts of valour he had been decorated. “In war, heroes are two a penny—in fact, if you are not a hero, you are nothing but a dirty dog,” he said.

  Outside of lunatic asylums there were not many un-disenchanted romantics left among the survivors of the First World War. George Oaks was one. For him, even in the black night of No Man’s Land, stars came out. When the debunkers, in their very just wrath, were unburdening their overloaded hearts in shocking reminiscence, George Oaks, with a rapt smile that must have been maddeningly irritating at the time, was telling the world how, breaking the awful silence before the Guards came up the road to die in Nieppe Forest, one lonely thrush began to sing; and how, when we were preparing to join battle with the enemy at Agincourt, Oaks glanced in his diary and saw that it was St. Crispin’s Day—whereupon he knew that we must win the day, and so we did. . . .

  And now he said that he was afraid.

  George Oaks crouched rather than sat in the summer-house, clasping his hands to keep them still, and a long, strong shudder stirred the loose fabric of the dressing-gown between his shoulders and his hips.

  “Albert,” he said, “it’s the oldest fear in the world. I knew I had it, first, over thirty years ago, when I was a boy in Flanders. Until then I’d believed that nothing could make me afraid. I was sure of that, as I was sure that nothing could make me steal a penny from a blind man. Fear was mean, Fear was a coward and a thief, Fear was a liar and a sneak, Fear was a secret poisoner. It wasn’t in me to be afraid. Remember, I was young and foolish then, Albert. I became as old and as wise as I am ever likely to be, overnight. My hair didn’t go grey in that awful night—it fell out. I know that my face went grey, because as soon as I came out of that nightmare, as soon as I woke up, I called for a mirror. You remember Paphnutius—he had become so ugly that, passin
g his hand over his face, he could feel his own hideousness? So it was with me. I reached out of the dark to touch myself, and touched something that was not me. . . . Then the good Sister had my bed moved into the garden of the hospital, because I began to cry. When I found myself out in the sunlight, I chattered and laughed—I could not stop talking and talking, I was so happy to see the sky. The Sister called me pauvre garçon, and said: ‘There, see now, the sun is shining.’ And so it was, Albert, so it was. But I never could forget the horror of that night of mine, which was timeless and without space.”

  “George, you never told me about this,” I said.

  “No, I never did, Albert, because it’s best for a man to keep his secret terrors to himself, especially in times like these, when . . .”

  “When what?”

  “Never mind. I can tell you this—every man has a secret fear which, properly played upon, will frighten him out of his wits, if he has not the courage to hold on to his reason until he dies of fright. You know that pain brings its own anodyne, if you can bear enough of it. In the same way, fear brings its own antidote, if only you can hold on to yourself long enough. But there are some fears, Albert, that frighten the realm of Chaos and Old Night . . .

  “It happened in 1917. I told you, I believe, that I transferred from the Hussars to the Engineers, Special Branch. When Jerry started using gas, the W.O. asked for men with scientific education, which I had. So I went into Gas, and I got gassed. That didn’t worry me. Incidentally, in a pretty little wood—I have not forgotten the birch trees, Albert; there was a dead squirrel—I was cut open through the belly by a shell splinter, and sat up against a tree-trunk, holding myself together with my knees, for two days and two nights, hanging on to my revolver and swearing to shoot the first man that touched me. When in doubt, Albert, keep still and hold your guts together. In any case, your men come first; that stands to reason. . . . However, this was nothing. Pain is not real for long . . . Death sends the lovely soul to wander under the sky, Death opens unknown doors. . . . It is most grand to die, Albert. Anyway, nothing to make a fuss about; there is always Beethoven, eh? Soon even the flies didn’t bother me. When Jerry stopped firing, the trees whispered cheek-to-cheek—all except one great old birch split by the shell that had knocked me down, and he was groaning. And upon my soul, Albert, there were bees! . . . What was I saying? That was nothing. Have you ever noticed that pain has no power to stick in your mind? Ask any honest woman—I say honest, mark you—who has borne half a dozen children. Pain is the Phenomenon, here and gone from moment to moment; the Soul is the Noumenon, eternal. If pain were durable, Man would be devoid of soul. . . . No, pain can’t hurt. You remember nothing but the anticipation of it. But Fear, Albert, Fear—which is Nothing—oh dear me, that can be real!

  “It happened in Flanders. I was in charge of six Livens Projectors. You know what they are? Immense steel tubes buried in the ground, crammed with high explosives, designed to throw one colossal shell, only once. These projectors were fired six at a time by an electric spark. Some responsible person had to stay behind to fire them, with one of those old detonating machines that worked with a plunger that had a stirrup-shaped handle. Our lines had fallen back, Albert, and in that wilderness of sodden dirt I waited all alone under the barrage, in the dark, behind my projectors, keeping an eye on my luminous watch—which was synchronised with the others of my line—counting the seconds to Zero Hour. From time to time I tugged gently at the electric wire to be sure that it was still connected. About five minutes before Zero Hour, the wire went dead, Albert. So I crawled out and followed that wire, knowing that it must have been cut by a shell. It was pitch dark, Albert. The fingers of my left hand were on the wire. On the way, I put my right hand into a dead man’s mouth. Still I was not afraid. At last I came to the broken end of my wire and groped about for the other end. Then a shell burst in the mud not twenty yards away, and I went over, not badly wounded, but stunned. And still I laughed, Albert! My left shoulder-blade was torn loose, so I groped with my right hand and found a wire. Somehow I managed, with one hand, to twist together two raw ends. Then I followed the wire back to the place I had come from, as I thought. My watch said thirty seconds to Zero Hour. I hurried. As I calculated, I was only twenty seconds away. Albert, my heart sang! I did not realise that I was following the wrong thread; that, in the confusion, I had taken hold of the wrong wire.

  “So, exactly, at Zero Hour, I found myself right under six projectors that were not mine at the very instant when they exploded. They went off a few inches over my head . . . And then I found myself lying on my back, fully conscious although my head was singing and spinning like a top; staring up at two stars which shone through the smoke—but paralysed, unable to move. And still I was not afraid, and there I lay until the stars went out and the sun came up.

  “Albert, I was quite happy. My body was dead, but my mind, Albert, had never been more alert and alive . . . although, when the guns jarred behind me—I think it must have been behind me; I no longer knew my back from my front—that sky seemed to jerk and quiver, like it did when the Olaf Trygvesson was shipping it green off the Horn, and I was clinging like a monkey to a frozen rope a hundred feet above the deck. Imagine a tempestuous sea overhead, and a cold black cloud at your back . . . the dolphin-torn, the gong-tormented sea; eh, Albert? When in doubt, look straight ahead. I looked at the clouds. By the God, Albert, I have always loved the sky! How happy I was! . . . Then someone said: ‘Here’s a dead ’un, Alex,’ and an ambulance man started to go through my pockets for papers. When I heard this, I said: ‘Hold hard there, you—I’m alive.’ But I couldn’t move my lips; no sound came out of me; I wasn’t breathing. One of them picked me up by the head, and another took my feet. My eyes were fixed in their sockets; I could see nothing but the sky. Then a voice said ‘Hup’ and I was being carried.

  “It was then, Albert, that I knew of what I was afraid. I was afraid of being buried alive. But I lay all day long, unable to move. A man came who recognised me. His name was Ted Margery, an Essex boy. We’d shared a dug-out once. He dropped a tear right on the tip of my nose, Albert, and I wanted to sneeze, but I couldn’t move. ‘I’m not dead, you silly cow,’ I wanted to say; but he closed my eyes for me. Everything was black then, and then I really was afraid.

  “We were burying our dead in a hurry then. I know that they carried me to the edge of a common grave, and rolled me over. Albert, I fell as you fall in a nightmare and landed on something wet and soft. The fall jolted my eyes open, and I saw that I was lying with my head on the chest of a dead soldier. He had only half a face—the lower half, set in a kind of whistling expression. Something hit me with a great moist smack—a shovelful of mud. And at that moment, by the grace of the God, I found the strength to scream, just as another shovelful of mud took me in the face. My eyes were full of mud . . . and oh, Christ, that darkness! And that fear! Sight and sound went away, and there was nothing but me in the grave.

  “And so I woke up, crying, six months later, in the hospital garden. I touched my head, and it was bald. I felt my face, and it was not my face, but an old man’s face, the face of a frightened old man. And when I called for a mirror, I didn’t recognise what I saw in it—only my eyes, Albert, when I forced myself to stare my reflection out of countenance and told it to go away. When in doubt, stare your reflection out of countenance, turn the mirror face-down, and think of great music. Then shall be brought to pass that which is written: Death is swallowed up in Victory. Death, where is thy sting? Grave, where is thy victory? . . .

  “So I came back. After the war was over, in 1919, I went to the Palladium to see George Robey, that great comedian, Albert. He was doing that monologue—you remember?—‘He told me my society was superfluous. . . . In other words, buzz off.’ And then, in the middle of a laugh, Albert, the proscenium arch seemed to come down, and narrow, and pout out to suck at me . . . and George Robey with his funny little hat was l
ight-years away, and the auditorium turned upside down so that the galleries were so many tiers of the dead, and the clapping applause was a spattering of shovelled mud . . . and the walls fell in . . . and there was a terrible darkness. I found myself in Great Marlboro’ Street, telling a policeman please, not to bury me—I wasn’t dead, and calling him Margery. He had been an Old Contemptible—he understood. George Robey came out by the stage-door, and I felt myself called upon to apologise to him. I shall never forget the weariness of that funny puffy face of his when he smiled at me and wished me well . . . for he must have seen that I was sick with a very old fear, Albert.

  “Claustrophobia. That dread of being buried alive. I thought I had cured myself. But when I found myself spinning down and down to meet the dead in that horrible, slimy, cold well . . . when that little disc of daylight seemed so far away, and your shadows fell across it and I was down there in the dark . . . everything came back, and for a few seconds I was struck senseless with black fear.

  “And so now you know why I was afraid, Albert, and of what. And upon this I set the seal of confession. It is a very bad thing, I tell you, to let such a thing be known. I wouldn’t have told you, even, if some little voice didn’t whisper that it might be good for us to share this secret. For I feel in my bones, Albert, that you and I are going to find ourselves alone in the dark pretty soon—I feel it in my bones. . . . Confidence for confidence, Albert; tell me, what is your great fear?”

  I said: “George, I swear to you, I don’t know! I’m afraid of everything as it comes. I’m equally afraid of so many things that I can’t put my finger on one thing in particular. I’m a bundle of worry—I’m afraid of everything and everybody, so to speak.”

  “Which should mean to say that, in the last analysis, you are actually afraid of nothing,” said George Oaks. “Lucky man, Albert, lucky man! You yield to everything and to nothing, like rubber. I yield to nothing and to everything, like cast iron with a flaw in it.”