The Great Wash

by Gerald Kersh

  Suddenly—I started, and that nacreous, volcano-blistered globe turned a hundredth part of a degree and became a mean mothball again—George Oaks said: “About Austin Crabbe. You heard Halfacre humouring me when I said he was murdered. I suppose you think I’m mad. Well, I’m not, you know.”

  I flipped the mothball away with my thumb, so that it broke in two in the clean, blackened fireplace. The plane surfaces of the hemispheres, brilliantly crystalline, crazily rocking and spinning, caught the light again. One half of the ball staggered away into the shadow; the other half turned, scintillating. “No, George, you never could be mad,” I heard myself saying. “George, I believe you. You are my only true friend, so I believe without seeing. I want no evidence, only your word. . . . Do you know, I felt something like ice in my heart when I thought you were lying after your word of honour in connection with those papers this evening? Silly, yes. But that is how I am. I can’t give half my faith . . . Tell me about Austin Crabbe, George.”

  Half smiling at the ceiling, shaking his head with a kind of awe as one who finds himself tingling fingertip-to-fingertip with the Inapprehensible, George Oaks said: “Really, how beautifully everything fits together! . . . When I was a child, my mother gave me a jigsaw puzzle, mixed up the pieces, and left me alone to play with them—having, mark you, given me a glimpse of the picture of which they were the mixed-up fragments. There was some blue sky, green leaves, black tree-trunks, black shadows, a girl in red with a brown basket, and a grey beast. When the assembled puzzle was broken up, and its parts all mixed together, I went to work with confidence, having the picture in mind. Blue to blue, green to green, red to red, grey to grey, and black to black—that is what my instinct told me. So I put green to green and blue to blue, and so on, and found that, out of their proper juxtapositions, even identical colours and interlocking shapes didn’t make sense. . . . The shiny shoe of the little girl was the wet nose of the grey beast, and somewhere between the trees and the sky there occurred a hairy paw with nails. You can’t imagine, Albert, how I cried over it—I was only a child—until it occurred to me to transpose four identically-shaped pieces—shiny shoe to wet nose, and shadow between leaves to shadow in grass. After that, everything seemed to fall into place of its own accord, and there was Little Red Riding Hood with her basket, accosted by the wicked wolf. And will you believe me when I tell you that my soul soared up as if I had discovered some tremendous truth—which, indeed, I had? Albert, all are but parts of one stupendous whole. . . .

  “Needless to say, once the spell was broken, the easiest bits to piece together were the hopelessly complicated bits. The high blue part, the open sky, that took longest of all; because every little part of it was of the same colour and maddeningly similar shape. But at last, with frenzy and patience, I found one bit that fitted a certain dangerous corner, and so saw God’s heaven.

  “Well, so it has been with Kadmeel. But in his case, the picture that I started, quite idly, to piece together was a mad montage, a kind of evil dream in which it was horribly logical for the wrong things to be in the right places. . . . You know, Albert, Austin Crabbe was an old friend of mine. He was Lance-Bombardier in the Artillery when I was Trooper in the Cavalry. He got a D.C.M.; last man of his battery alive on the Dunes at Dunkirk—in the First War, of course—still manning his gun, though seriously wounded in the side. A common, pig-headed Geordie, he was, from Durham City, and one of the best of the younger men in Fleet Street at the time. Wrong-headed, cross-grained, cantankerous—anything you like. Mean, if you like; brutal, if you like; but honest, right or wrong, and a fighter first and foremost.

  “In 1918 he came out very sad, very bitter, disillusioned. It happened to a lot of the best of us, Albert—Richard Aldington, Siegfried Sassoon, and so forth. I remember Crabbe threw his medals into the Thames at Blackfriars. We all had reason to be bitter then, Albert . . . Mr. Sicker, who sold the War Office shoddy khaki serge, retired with three million of money . . . Douglas Haig, for his military blunders, got an earldom and a bronze statue in Whitehall . . . I caught the poet, Wilfred Owen, when he fell with a bullet in his head—I am the enemy you killed, my friend—do you remember? . . . And where was old England? Oh yes, we were bitter then—especially against politicians. How does it go? . . . I could not dig, I dared not rob, Therefore I liked to please the mob—Kipling has a word for everything . . . What tale shall serve me there, among my angry and defrauded young? Eh?

  “So: some of Austin Crabbe lived, but most of him died; not even as you and I, as it happens. He curdled, Albert, curdled with hate. Now, you must know, hate can be healthy, provided it isn’t blind; like human love. Blind love is the father and mother of blind hate. Austin Crabbe loved England blindly, and hated her enemies blindly. After that war he transferred his hatred of Germany to cartels and combines and trusts; to Big Business in general.

  “You remember, Albert? First of all it seemed that he was going over to the Bolsheviks. Then it looked as if he was with the Fascists. And finally—marvel of marvels!—he became the official spokesman for Lord Kadmeel’s Sciocrats, and everybody said that Austin Crabbe was bought out. Albert, that was not so. Albert, it must have happened to you, as it has happened to all of us—hot and tired and desperate, with the bum-bailiffs on your doorstep, you went half-crying to your bank that has a certified capital of forty million pounds, and went on your knees for the loan of a fiver. They told you your account was fifteen shillings overdrawn, and turned to you a face of stone. You and your wife and children would be put out into the street tomorrow morning? Then it was: ‘Very sorry, Mr. Kemp. We can’t help. You should live within your means’—a bloody lecture, mind you, into the bargain! In that moment, didn’t you pray from the bottom of your heart for a great bright fire fanned by a strong north wind to blast these pot-bellied, hollow-hearted, piggy-bankers off the face of the earth? You did, and rightly so; but you are a sane man, Albert; in your darkest hour there was nothing wrong in your head that eight hours of sound sleep and a cup of tea and a cigarette wouldn’t cure. I mean, you live by recharging yourself with fresh hope in your sleep, as a sane man must.

  “But Austin Crabbe lived in a state of permanent disgust, and the trouble was that this disgust of his was not without good reason, and the very intensity of it gave him a certain power. Kadmeel should have known better than to employ Austin Crabbe. There must always be something intensely personal about a very profound disgust . . . There is nothing so dreadfully lonely as a very great hate: it can’t be touched, it bites indiscriminately, it must eat into that which is nearest to it . . . eat its way out, and burn and corrode until it has spent itself and forced everything that would combine with it to turn to salty dust. Austin Crabbe in a Movement! You might as well say, vitriol in a paper bag, or fluorine in a jampot.

  “Austin Crabbe went over to Lord Kadmeel, not for the money, which was considerable, but because he really believed at the time that the Sciocrats were right—that the time had come for a colossal cleansing of the world, some stupendous clean sweep, some cataclysmic spring-cleaning . . . I imagine he wanted to scrape away the memories of a million years, the fool, and start from scratch again, nobler and stronger. (This, Albert, is by no means a rare yearning: why do you think two continents fell in love with Tarzan?)

  “But the time came, as it was bound to come, when Austin Crabbe woke up one morning to realise that he and Kadmeel were, in fact, enemies. Dear old Austin Crabbe! In his heart he loved the good and the true and the beautiful . . . I mean, he loved what we, in our nostalgia, choose to remember of the past, which can’t ever be brought back, Albert, except in travesty. He was an ageing man in search of his youth. Poor Austin—nothing goes quite so sour as boyhood or girlhood kept too long in the cask. To cut it short: Austin Crabbe began to hate and fear the crazy New World of the Sciocrats and, bitterly honest as he was, he said so. Therefore Kadmeel got rid of him.

  “There’s no doubt that if Chatter
ton had been Kadmeel’s right-hand man at that time, Crabbe would have met with an accident there and then—something would have got into his last drink, perhaps, and he’d have been found drowned. As it was, Kadmeel had Austin Crabbe neatly framed on a charge of embezzlement and sent to jail for eighteen months. It wasn’t a bad move, at that. Austin Crabbe went in like a roaring lion, and came out spluttering, completely discredited, a hopeless crank. On Sundays he used to address the crowds in Hyde Park; people came miles—to laugh at him. A regular group of hecklers turned up every week to bait him. ‘Three cheers for Lord Kadmeel!’ they shouted, these bloody loafers, and Crabbe would literally dance and foam in a perfect ecstasy of rage. Once he went for the whole crowd single-handed with his bare fists, and knocked three men down before the police collared him. There was serious talk then of having him put away. But we got him loose, somehow, and after that he gave up public speaking and sat down in his frightful little furnished room in Blood Alley to compose a formidable pamphlet exposing Kadmeel and the Sciocrats. His idea was to force Kadmeel to have him up on a charge of criminal libel, pleading justification. . . .

  “Oh, that room, that furnished room in Blood Alley! The house was run by an old hag called Mother Glory. It was lighted by gas. I don’t believe that a window had been opened there for three hundred years. Crabbe’s room was a kind of excrescence on the roof, which had been lit by a skylight, over which Crabbe had pasted brown paper for the blackout in 1939. He was very particular, you see, about running as few risks as possible—he didn’t want to die with his work unfinished. Remember that, Albert. Crabbe told me so, in so many words, the night he died. It was in the Cheshire Cheese. He was weary rather than drunk, but cheerful, for him—he had been commissioned (the irony of it, eh, Albert?) to ghost-write the life story of some bucket-shop keeper, and had fifty pounds advance to draw in Paternoster Row on the following day. Meanwhile, could I lend him a little something, because he was absolutely penniless? I lent him a pound note, and he went home.

  “Next morning, he was found gassed in his bed. They had to break the door down—he had screwed on two great iron bolts, and a pair of gate hinges too. It seemed that anything but simple suicide was absolutely out of the question.

  “But, Albert, listen: Crabbe’s attic was lighted by gas, and so was the landing outside his door. One slot-meter on the landing served both gas jets. When they went over Crabbe’s pockets, they found one pound note, no other money. And in the meter, which had been emptied only two days before, they found thirty-six pennies. I was there soon after the police. Old newspapers had been stuffed into the crack under the door. But who, smashing in the door of a gas-filled room, waits to see whether such caulking has been tamped home from the inside, or the outside? And I noticed, also, that in all that sordid old house there was only one clean thing—the one thing that, in any house, has a right to be dirty. That is, the tip of the gas jet on the landing. As sure as I sit here, what happened was this: somebody climbed those stairs after Austin Crabbe that night, waited until he had begun to snore, made sure of a good supply of gas by putting a handful of coppers in the meter, connected the gas jet on the landing with Crabbe’s room by means of a length of rubber tubing, turned on the tap, and went away; returned at dawn, disconnected the tubing, turned off the tap, and there you are—a perfect murder. Objections: didn’t the first man in Crabbe’s room notice that the gas jet in there was turned off? Answer: the first thing you do when you’ve burst into a gas-filled room is to rush to the gas-tap and turn it, presumably, off; in the excitement of the moment it’s a horse to a hen you won’t notice which way you’re turning that tap. Query: all this involved a certain amount of coming and going, surely? Reply: in Mother Glory’s den, men and women of all sorts were constantly coming and going all night long. Conclusion: Deliberate, cold-blooded murder, unprovable.

  “I had a look at Austin Crabbe’s papers, of course. They were pretty numerous, but arranged in remarkably neat order. Most of them were notes, scrupulously compiled, concerning vast and intricate financial manipulations by Lord Kadmeel and his associates—complicated, mysterious manœuvres involving tens of millions of pounds, billions of dollars, all over the world. And, curiously enough, there were some crude scrawls that looked like a schoolboy’s first attempts at map drawing—primitive, clumsy outlines of places I had never seen before, as if poor Austin Crabbe had been trying to soothe his exasperated mind by inventing new continents, or dreaming up Atlantis. . . . I remembered how, whenever I felt sad and lonely, as a boy, I used to comfort myself by drawing maps of places that were not—islands, always islands, Albert—and marking them full of jungles, swamps, pirates, cannibals; and so go on a dream-hunt for buried treasure. Somehow, there was always a golden-haired girl involved, who was the spitting image of Queen Alexandra, only she wore a dress you could almost see through, but not quite! . . . And my heart bled for Austin Crabbe.

  “I wanted those papers, but they were sent to his next of kin, his sister, a school teacher who had been sent with some evacuated kids to Devon. I went down there, sorted her out, and told her that if she had no use for her dead brother’s notes, it was possible that I might make something of them, so that I wouldn’t mind paying a few pounds for them, provided they had no sentimental value. She asked how much I’d be prepared to pay, and when I said about twenty pounds she sighed with relief, and said: ‘Oh, then I wasn’t robbed, after all. I had no use for the stuff—it was just lists and scribbles. So when poor Austin’s friend—Mr. Gaylord Taylor, I daresay you know him—offered me fifty pounds for them, I let him have them. Gaylord Taylor, you know, of the London Evening Post?’ I didn’t know, because there’s no such man as Gaylord Taylor on the London Evening Post. She said he was a well-spoken young man; but as for particulars of his appearance, really, she wasn’t in the habit of looking at men very closely. . . . But surely I must know him? He was just the right height, somewhat taller than herself, but not too tall, and of a sensible age—between forty and fifty. He had very good teeth, dimples when he smiled, a profile ‘like a Roman coin’, was tastefully dressed in nigger brown with a black tie in mourning for Austin, and had capable-looking hands. He would not stay for tea, but she had promised to send him some Devon junket care of his office, and would I please give him her kind regards? Then she sniffed a couple of times over her brother, said that the trouble with him was that he drank, and chucked me out. And that was that. Another dead end.

  “Putting piece to piece in this puzzle, Albert, what had I assembled? A monomaniac who wasn’t bad, a murder without a murderer, and a spot of light without source.

  “Austin Crabbe couldn’t have been crazy—he must have been trying to make sense out of Kadmeel’s schemes, which were so fantastic that they came near to what men love to dream about and blush to acknowledge as feasible. Old Crabbe, foaming on a soap-box on Sunday afternoon in Hyde Park, was harmless. But Austin Crabbe, holding his tongue and directing his venom in fine filaments at the sharp point of a pen—Austin Crabbe in high concentration—he was dangerous; he had the power to force an issue and to expose matters that the Sciocrats couldn’t try to explain away in open court without setting fire to certain trains of serious thought. So he was killed.

  “Killed by whom? Obviously, by Kadmeel through his agents. Hence, even in dying, Austin Crabbe proved himself in the right. To whom did he prove this? Only to old Conker—only to me Trooper George Oaks, who knew the man Lance-Bombardier Crabbe, and understood him in his frenzy . . . And here, you may say, was an opportunity for me to raise Cain, arouse suspicions, and force official enquiry into the Open Verdict on the Death of Crabbe? Oh no! There were too many ways of discrediting me, even if I had managed to get hold of Crabbe’s papers and sweat the rhyme and reason out of them. Even if the whole world has faith in you, it’s dangerous to show unfinished work, Albert . . . and the greater the work, the remoter the end. . . .

  “If in doubt, old friend, keep still. I kept
still, reasoning like this, ‘If I am right, which I feel I must be, the picture-puzzle of which I hold assembled only a few pieces must take shape somewhere around me, eventually. If I show my hand now, the design must be changed, so that what I hold can be proved meaningless. If I am patient, the God will send me a certain something more, and then I shall have in my hand a certain nucleus without which even a madman’s dream cannot exist’. . . . Of my Base Metal may be filed a Key that shall unlock the Door he howls without. Eh, Albert?

  “So. Then came this Monty Cello, and several more very tricky pieces of my puzzle slid into position . . . exceptionally tricky, because this puzzle is largely an affair of shadow and penumbra, in which light occurs only that it may let you see a twilight, and the twilight itself is only a device by means of which the designer cleverly emphasises a most mysterious darkness under the cover of which anything may hide.

  “Don’t you see, Albert, don’t you see?” cried George Oaks, his eyes like stars, “don’t you see that this Monty Cello affair—especially after the Yank authorities have exhumed the corpse of Kurt Brevis—starts a trail which Scotland Yard absolutely must follow? Don’t you see that quite soon, now, I shall be in a position to compel the world to take seriously something I never dared to whisper before? For all his grunting and groaning, Halfacre is well and truly aroused now, so that even if you and I should happen to get our throats cut, it wouldn’t matter a great deal. . . . In fact, it might be a very good thing if Chatterton cut our throats at this point, Albert, because then Halfacre would have a real blood-spoor to follow, and there’s nothing that makes Halfacre more indignant than murder—especially of a friend. This is excellent, excellent!”

  I was surprised to find myself laughing. “You don’t think it will come to that, surely?” I asked.