Clock Without Hands

by Gerald Kersh

  “I did give the gentleman the programme,” said Henry Ford.

  “You did not!”

  “Sir, I did,” said Ford, and Bond slapped his face again.

  The boy began to sob hysterically, and Bond, remembering that there was to be an inspection on the following day, stepped back, locked his hands behind him and said: “Upstairs, you sniv­elling creature – upstairs! I’ll deal with you later on.”

  But before he went, Henry Ford said: “I did give the gentleman the programme.”

  “Ford, you are a little liar, and I know it; and you know it. I’ll deal with you later.”

  Later the tough boy Jones saw Ford crying. “What’s up?” he asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “What you crying for?”

  “I’m not.”

  “What you done?”

  “Nothing,” said Ford. “Jonesey, I’m going to get out of here. D’you want to come with me?”

  “Where to?”

  “Anywhere.”

  “Where’s anywhere?”

  “I don’t care. I’m going to get out of here.”

  “Walking?”

  “Any way.”

  “Remember what happened to Carr, when he pinched the bicycle. They sent him to the Reformatory.”

  “I won’t pinch anybody’s bicycle. I’m going to get out of here. Want to come?”

  “No, I’m going to wait. And you wait!” said Jones, through his teeth, “you wait, when I get out! Oh, you wait – just you wait!”

  “You wouldn’t say anything?” asked Ford.

  Jones took a half-crown out of his sock and said: “Better have this back.”

  “No,” said Ford, “you keep that. Oh well. . . . Inspection to-morrow.”

  “Inspection! The inspector!” said Jones, with a sneer. “ ‘Are you happy here, little man?’ . . . What are you going to do – say no? You say yes. What are you going to do? The inspector goes away, but here you are all the time.”

  “I’m running away,” said Henry Ford. “After the inspection, I’m running away.”

  “But you don’t know where to?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t care. I never did anything. I’m going.”

  * * * * *

  The inspector was always accompanied by the vicar. The boys of St. Timothy’s made a group, four deep, and were photo­graphed, smiling. They were ordered to smile at the camera, but some of them could not achieve a smile. Therefore, Mr. Bond or­gan­ised rehearsals. The tallest boys stood at the back, the smallest boys sat on benches in the front row, and at a certain moment they all said “Cheese”, showing their teeth and stretching their mouths. Thus, the boys of St. Timothy’s were always smiling, dressed in their best clothes.

  “Cheese, now, don’t forget your cheese,” whispered Mr. Bond, as they fell into line for the photographer. But Ford rebelled. He said cheese through his teeth, with a down-turned mouth. When Mr. Bond looked at him he closed his mouth and said cheese in a whisper through his nose. His glum, big-boned face made a blot in the group. The inspector said to Mr. Bond: “There is a refractory-looking boy, Mr. Bond.”

  “The most difficult of them all,” said Bond. “And a born liar, I’m afraid. We’ve had occasion to punish him for lying, I’m sorry to say. There must be some good in him somewhere, and we’re trying hard to bring it out. But what is bred in the bone will come out in the flesh, Mr. Rose. Dour, he is, and sulky; unsociable. I hate to have to say it, but there it is. Goodness knows, we’re patient.”

  “He does appear quite deliberately to scowl, Mr. Bond.”

  “I’m afraid he does. I shudder to think what will happen to him when we have no more influence over him.”

  “I’d like to have a word with him, Mr. Bond.”

  “With pleasure, Mr. Rose.”

  Henry Ford was led into the presence of Mr. Rose, who said: “Come along now, Henry Ford. Up with the little mouth, Henry. Why, my goodness, you almost look as if you weren’t happy. Aren’t you happy, Henry Ford?”

  Ford was silent.

  “Has the cat got your tongue?” asked Mr. Rose.

  “No, sir.”

  “You can talk to me, you know, as to a friend, Henry Ford. Do you know, I have a motor-car made by a man named Henry Ford? And he was once a little boy, just like you. Eh?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then what are you looking so miserable about, Henry Ford? You’re not hungry?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You have a good home here, haven’t you, Henry?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You’re well treated, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well then, why aren’t you smiling?”

  “I can’t, sir.”

  “Something wrong with your face, Henry Ford?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Then what’s the matter with you?” asked the inspector.

  “I don’t want to say cheese, and I don’t want to smile,” said Henry Ford, and then he burst into tears.

  Mr. Bond, with an apologetic shrug, said: “You see, Mr. Rose? But we do our best.”

  Mr. Rose said: “Henry Ford, you had better try and pull yourself together.”

  The boy could not stop crying. It was as if he realised that the inspector was his last legitimate line of communication with the world, and Mr. Bond had blocked that line. So he wept.

  “Poor little fellow,” said Mr. Bond.

  “Cheese?” said Mr. Rose. “What does he mean by cheese? Do you want cheese, young man?”

  “No, thank you, sir,” said Henry Ford.

  “Go along – run along,” said Mr. Bond, with a sweet smile and a bitter glance. “Off you go, Henry Ford. Off you go.” When the boy was gone he said to Mr. Rose: “It is by no means easy.”

  “I quite appreciate that, Mr. Bond; as a matter of curiosity, what does the boy want with cheese?”

  “We get them to say cheese from time to time. It’s an exercise, you see.”

  “Phonetically?”

  “Yes, and gymnastically . . . for the face, the muscles about the mouth.”

  “I wish one could do more for these boys.”

  “Ford is not a willing boy, I’m afraid. He’s not a truthful boy. I had hopes for Ford. I let him carry certain responsibilities, Mr. Rose. He seemed at one time to be serious, you know; honour­able, conscientious. Then when I gave him certain messages to deliver, I’m afraid I found him out to be a liar, a deliberate liar. I hate to say it: I’m disappointed in that boy. I feel that he has let me down. In a way I feel discredited.”

  “You have no occasion to feel anything of the kind, Mr. Bond. No occasion at all; there are boys,” said the inspector, “and boys.”

  “How true, Mr. Rose. How well you put it. All the same, this is a great responsibility and, considering how hard we try . . . it’s a little discouraging.”

  “I understand and sympathise. But there are backward and difficult children everywhere – Problem Children. I’ve come across many of them. Some grow out of it, and others go to the bad. That, I’m afraid, is a Problem Child – intractable, I’m afraid . . .”

  The inspector shook his head sadly, and so did Mr. Bond. But then the vicar came up with Mrs. Bond. He was like a partly-melted wax mask of Julius Caesar dripping into and over a collar. Mrs. Bond was dressed for the occasion in pale grey. She was gra­cious; the vicar was effusive. He said: “Mr. Bond, I am happy, very very happy, at this spectacle of youth in bloom.”

  Mr. Bond smiled in depreciation, and said: “The little that one can do, one does, sir.”

  Henry Ford was saying to Jones: “Will you swear on your God’s honour that you won’t split?”

  “I won’t split.”

  “Well, look; after roll call, I’m going to hop it.”

  “To-day?”

  Henry Ford might have said: “If we go forward we die, if we go back­ward we die; better go forward.” He said: “Today. Cover up for me if you can, will you, Jonesey?”r />
  “All right. I will if I can. But you know what I’d do if I was you? I’d get out before roll call.”

  “What for?”

  “Why, that’d give me time to nip out to the heath. Then I’d find a place to hide, and lie low till night. And then I’d go on. Old Bond’s busy with the vicar and the inspector. If I wanted to nip off, I’d do it now. But where are you going to go to?”

  “I’m going to Southampton, and then I’m going off to sea. Jonesey, why not come with me?”

  Jones said: “Don’t be silly. As soon as old Bond finds out you’re gone he’ll tell the copper, and they’ll have you back in five minutes. I’ll wait. It won’t be long. And then you wait and see what I’ll do! Just you wait and see what I’ll do!”

  “What’ll you do, Jonesey?”

  “Never mind. You’ll see. You wait. But you’d know what I’d do if I was you? Nip down to the kitchen and get hold of some grub. There won’t be anybody down there now. You go and grab some grub.”

  “Um . . . Well, good-bye for ever, Jonesey.”

  “Good-bye,” said Jones.

  The boys had been told to play, and were playing. Mr. and Mrs. Bond, the vicar, the inspector and two or three interested visitors were making conversation in a tight little group. Henry Ford went into the house, crept to the kitchen and foraged for food. He found nothing but a basket of apples; everything else was hidden or locked away. He filled his pockets with apples and, on an afterthought, took a tin sprinkler full of salt.

  So, with a toy compass, a Chinese coin, a wheel out of a watch, a part of a lipstick, a broken comb, and the cup-shaped top of a thermos flask, he ran away to sea.

  He slunk in the bushes, hiding when a pedestrian or a cyclist passed, loping like a wolf from tree to tree along the canal bank until he reached the gorse and the young birch trees on the common. Having found a hollow, he lay still and ate an apple. Twilight gathered, night fell, and Henry Ford, terrified but happy, believed that he was alone in the world.

  He was thinking of Red Indians and listening to the hooting of a distant owl, when a hand that felt like hot iron pincers took him by the neck.

  * * * * *

  His stomach leapt up to his throat and his heart fell into his belly, while all the blood in his body rushed tingling to his skin. His head was full of lithe copper-coloured men with tomahawks, who moved, unseen and unheard, under the cover of the dark. But when he turned his head he saw only a little, light-coloured, elderly man. Shocked as he was, after the first glance Henry Ford was not afraid of this man, who might have been fifty or sixty, and had a pitted weatherbeaten, battered face. One of his ears resembled a vegetable. Some appalling blow had beaten in the bridge of his nose. There was grey bristle like a pinch of iron filling on his upper lip, and more of the same on his chin. He was dressed in nothing but a flannel nightshirt, curiously striped, and he had only three toes on his left foot. Yet his eyes were the blank, blue eyes of a baby.

  “Leave go of me!” said Henry Ford.

  The man in the nightshirt released him immediately, and then it could be seen that he had only three fingers on his right hand. Henry Ford knew – although he did not know how he knew – that this man was mad; that he belonged up the hill in the sana­tor­ium; that he too had run away.

  The man said, in a hoarse, unearthly whisper: “Are they after you too, mate?”

  “Sir?”

  “Do they want to lock you up too, comrade?”

  Before he had time to think of what he meant to say, Ford heard himself saying: “Yes, sir.”

  “Co-mate and brother in exile. Shake hands,” said the man in the nightshirt, offering what was left of his right hand. The two fingers and the thumb closed on the boy’s wrist, so that he cried: “Ow!”

  “I’m sorry, brother. Co-mate and brother in exile, I wouldn’t hurt you. Where are you off to?”

  “I’m going away to sea, sir.”

  “Ah . . . the sea, the sea, the salt sea unharvested! Lies it behind us, the sea! Bend your oars and your sails to the winds of the morning! Oh Poseidon, show us the shore! . . . Can you navigate?”

  “No, sir.”

  The voice of the man in the nightshirt, although he was still whispering, had developed a rasping note of command.

  He said: “I’ll teach you. I am a captain. I could take you by the dead reckoning from here around the Horn. Then I felt like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken. . . . Ah me, ah me! When I was your age I was apprentice on the Olaf Trygvesson – I too, I too! Even I, mate, even I. What’s your name?”

  Ford had intended to re-christen himself Rex Beverley, but he said: “Ford, sir.”

  “Shake. How do you do, Ford? I am Captain Shirley. You are my new first officer. Navigation? I’ll show you. We’ve got a boat, don’t you see, a boat . . . a schooner . . . over there . . .” Captain Shirley pointed to the rising moon. “Oh, it little profits that an idle king by his cold hearth beside these barren crags, chained to an aged wife, I mete and dole unequal laws unto a savage tribe that eat and hoard and sleep and know not me. . . . Brother, Mr. Ford, there lies the port! The vessel puffs her sail! There glooms the dark broad sea!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Not ‘Yes, sir’ – ‘Aye aye, sir’.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  “That’s better. Ah . . . my mariners, souls that have toiled and wrought and thought with me. . . .You and I are old, eh? But some work of noble note may yet be done, Mr. Ford. I assure you . . . it is not too late to seek a newer world. So push off; and sit­ting well in order. . . . No, no, don’t go. . . . Smite the sound­ing fur­rows, Mr. Ford, for my purpose holds to sail beyond the sunset and the paths of all the western stars until I die. . . . D’you know what, they insisted on giving me baths up there? To me, mark you, Mr. Ford! To me! Soon we will push off, mate. Soon, Mr. Ford! It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles and see the great Achilles whom we knew . . . though much is taken, much abides; and though we are not now that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are. Correct me if I’m wrong. We are! We are! Made weak by time and fate, but strong in soul to strive, to find, to seek, and not to yield! . . . Very good, Mr. Ford. Carry on, Mr. Ford.”

  He had Henry’s wrist in a terrible grip again, and his mutilated hand was hot and rough like a dog’s paw. Somewhere behind the burning dry heat of that hand, Henry Ford felt a quick urgent pulsation and looking at the captain, in a fading light, he saw that he was very ill. So he said:

  “Can I get you anything, sir?”

  “Thank you, Mr. Mate, you can get me a drink if you will be so good. I’m thirsty. All night long . . . all night long . . . night after night, night after night. . . . And there’s a pampero blowing, a wild pampero. . . . Get me something to drink, Mr. Ford, if you will be so good . . .”

  “You wait here,” said Henry Ford,” and I’ll be back.”

  “Rest? Rest? Shall I not have all eternity to rest in? . . . Ah-ha! A star! So near and yet so far! The stars in their courses fought against Sisera. Rest? Oh, now I shall rest, Henry Ford! Get me something to drink, Mr. Ford.”

  Now Henry Ford performed a noble deed. He knew that the people who ran the sanatorium must be looking for Captain Shirley, and believed that the gentleman of St. Timothy’s, to­gether with the Sixweston policeman, were searching for him. Yet he crawled through the gorse to the canal and filled his cap and the cup-shaped top of the vacuum flask with water, scummed with green algae. The woollen cap leaked. He aban­doned discretion and ran. There was not much more than a gill of dirty water left when he arrived, and the little old man in the nightshirt was delirious. But he drank the water and said: “That was good. What was that?”

  “Water, sir.”

  “Nor any drop to drink. . . . Water is a very good servant, but it is a cruel master. More. More, Mr. Mate. More.”

  But Henry Ford had heard footsteps crunching in the gravel by the canal, and he said: “In a minute,” and wr
ung the wetness out of his cap into his little cup. The old captain sucked it down like dry sand, and said again: “Water!”

  It was then that Henry Ford became sublime. Not forgetting the homecoming to St. Timothy’s, the little matter of the stick, and the melancholy vista of the years ahead, he said: “Look. Let me put my jersey over you, and you lie still just for a minute, and I’ll go and get you a doctor.”

  The old man in the nightshirt got his head up between two waves of delirium, and said, quite sanely: “No, please don’t. I don’t want any more doctors. Just leave me alone. I’ve had doctors for years. Who are you?”

  “Henry Ford, sir.”

  “And what are you doing here?”

  “I’m going away to sea, sir.”

  “Where do you come from?”

  “St. Timothy’s Home, sir.”

  “You mean the Home?”

  “Yes, sir. St. Timothy’s, sir.”

  Captain Shirley made a lowing noise and said: “Dee-dee-dee-dum. . . . Dee-dee-dee-dum. . . . Dee-dee-dee-dee-dee dee-dee-dee-dum. . . . Beethoven. Number Five. D’you know that, Mr. Mate?”

  “No, sir.”

  “There is the only important thing in the world, Mr. Ford. There is the most important thing in the world, Mr. Ford. Be like that man! Ah, the greatness of it! . . . Oh, lovely night! . . . Mine enemy’s dog, though he had bit me, should have stood that night against my fire, Mr. Mate!”

  “You stay there, sir, and let me get you a doctor,” said Henry Ford.

  The old man in the nightshirt was making a strange disturbing noise, somewhere between the back of his throat and the centre of his stomach; a noise that reminded Henry Ford of the noise that might be made by dragging a dry stick across a grating.

  “Pray do not mock me. . . . To tell plainly, I feel I am not in my perfect mind,” said the old man, fumbling at the collar of his nightshirt. “. . . All the skill I have remembers not these garments; nor I know not where I did lodge last night. Do not laugh at me . . . do not laugh at me . . . an old man . . . a few goats, señor, a few goats. An old man with a few goats. Do not laugh at me. I am dying, Egypt, dying. . . . Finish, good lady, the bright day is done and we are for the dark. And so, Mr. Mate, let us roll our sleeves and show our scars and for God’s sake . . . For God’s sake, Mr. Ford, sit down. . . For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the deaths of kings. Ah me! Let’s stop to sleep now . . . I am the enemy you killed my friend! So let’s sleep now. Oh, greatness! Oh, the wonder of it! The pity of it, Mr. Mate! Iago, Iago, the pity of it—— Oh, Iago, Iago, the pity of it, Iago, oh, Iago, Iago, the pity of it, the pity of it, the pity of it . . .”