by Gerald Kersh
“Sorry, son. My wind isn’t what it used to be,” said the policeman, and gave him a penny.
“Thank you, sir.”
“Cheer up, son,” said the policeman, “it can’t last for ever. One little breather, and off we go again. You’ll be a man soon. What’re you going to do then?”
To the policeman’s astonishment, Henry Ford said: “I’m going to be rich, and strong. I’m going to keep my promise to people. When anybody comes to me, I bet you I’ll help him get away. I won’t send nobody back. I’ll help everybody to get away. I bet you I will.”
The policeman lifted him again and said: “Come on, son.”
The policeman was very warm, and tired. Henry Ford could hear the wheezing of his chest and the beating of his heart; and he could see, in the moonlight, the gleaming silver buttons on his dark-blue bosom. “I can walk,” he said.
“You can walk later on,” said the policeman.
The boy relaxed. His eyes rolled away from the silver buttons of the blue policeman to the silver stars of the sky. The warmth of the man, the feverish heat of the exhausted boy, the buttons, the stars, the hot blue cloth and the cool blue night ran together and made a beautiful darkness. “I’ll be so good to children,” said Henry Ford, and then he fell asleep in the policeman’s arms, and was carried back to St. Timothy’s Home for Waifs and Strays.
FAIRY GOLD
PART I
That was the Friday afternoon when a well-known silk merchant died of the heat in St. Paul’s Churchyard while laughing at a funny story. Suddenly he folded up joint by joint and died before they had time to loosen his collar; and the weather was so oppressively hot that his friends had not sufficient energy to express surprise or simulate grief. Collars were wet, grey bandages. People were irritable and careless. Water, poured in at the mouth, poured out at the forehead. In the stuffier City offices people were uncomfortably aware of the fact that their neighbours had feet. The minutes dragged, clogged with heat and moisture and gritty with dust. Everybody was thinking: To-morrow is Saturday, which is a half-day. The day after is Sunday. Then, thank God, comes August Bank Holiday, so there will be nothing to do until Tuesday. This thought, alone, was enough to unsettle many precise minds, and draw attention away from letters to be perused and books to be balanced. Old, tried clerks, accustomed to detecting at a glance one pennyworth of error in ten thousand poundsworth of figures, were horrified to find their concentration out of focus: they paused toward the feet of red or black columns, bit their lips, banished from their minds insidious fantasies of quiet afternoons in the garden; rushed irritably back to where they had started and, line by line, climbed down again. The stenographers sighed, and there was a great deal of irritable tongue-clicking and some irritating grating of cogs and ratchets as they twirled back the platens of their machines to rub out foolish errors – or ripped away whole sheets before starting again with wet faces and set teeth. Everyone was thinking of cold water or cold beer, green grass or cool shade.
In St. Martin’s-le-Grand a solicitor named Pismire, having read a short letter addressed to Forty Richards and Co. Ltd., scribbled an impatient signature and told his managing clerk to have the letter posted. “And now let’s get out of this,” said Mr. Pismire.
This managing clerk was famous, in the City, for his cunning and his caution. He re-read everything five or six times, even his tram tickets. It was said of him that he had dismissed an office boy for wasting too much pencil in the mechanical sharpener. But the day was so hot that, having looked at the letter, he threw it languidly to a typist and told her to send it off at once.
At any other hour of the day he would have noticed that there was something out of the ordinary in the feel of this letter. The firm of Pismire went in for a characteristically elegant notepaper, very thin but beautifully white and opaque, expensively die-stamped with the letter-heading. The managing clerk knew that such sheets tend to stick together, but did not notice, this afternoon, that the typist had used two top sheets of headed notepaper instead of one. She, thinking of something that could never be, pushed the folded letter into an envelope, which she threw into the letter-box.
Mr. Pismire’s letter was not important. It informed Forty Richards that an instruction of such and such an ultimo had been received, and that Pismire was proceeding in the case of a man named Greatheart who had accused Forty Richards of stealing his formula for a patent medicine which was becoming vastly popular under the name of Formula 40-R. The litigant was obviously mad. Formula 40-R was nothing but precipitated chalk, which Forty Richards packed in a pocket-size tin with a tricky cap. When you twisted the cap a square hole appeared, out of which you could shake a balanced dose. He sold it with the assistance of ingenious slogans: The Wind In Your Stomach Will Fill A Balloon, and Every Square Inch Of You Supports A Pressure of Fifteen Pounds. One Hiccup Lifts Tons, and Don’t Let Your Stomach Break Your Back.
Pismire’s letter was delivered at Forty Richards’s office by the first post on Saturday morning. Forty Richards’s secretary looked at it and, dabbing her upper lip with a handkerchief, said: “It’s only Pismire – proceeding according to instructions.”
“Good. File it.”
“Yes, Mr. Forty Richards,” said the secretary. She was a fat woman, almost overwhelmed by the heat of the day. As she closed her employer’s door she saw one of the clerks, walking sedately with a manilla folder under his arm.
“Oh, Mr. Trew!” she said. “I wonder if you’d mind putting this letter in the general file, under Pismire/Gen/Inst.?”
“Only too delighted,” said Mr. Trew, and he walked jauntily to the file. Having found the right section he opened the filing cabinet and put the lawyer’s letter in its proper place. Having done this, and slammed shut the deep green steel drawer, he observed that a sheet of paper had detached itself from the letter he had filed, and was lying on the floor. His first impulse was to kick it out of sight under the filing cabinet, but then the secretary passed on her way back to her little office, and Mr. Trew stooped and picked up the paper with exaggerated care, blowing it free of imaginary dust. The secretary disappeared, puffing and wheezing, and Mr. Trew, looking at what he had picked up, was at first disgusted to see that he had wasted good energy on a perfectly blank sheet of notepaper.
But the obvious costliness of the notepaper made him pause in the act of throwing it away: it felt so like a Bank of England note that he stopped to wish that it were, and to listen wistfully to its crisp, dry crackle as he shook it gently between a thumb and forefinger. Thinking of banknotes and looking at the name of Pismire he said to himself: Lord, say I woke up to-morrow morning, and found a letter on paper like this, telling me somebody’d died and left me fifty million pounds! Well, of course, it couldn’t be to-morrow morning, because there’s no post on Sunday. Well, all right. Say I get home this afternoon with my lousy four pounds ten in my pocket to last me over the Bank Holiday and all next week. I open the door of the old digs. I’m a month behind with my rent; I’ve promised faithfully to let the landlady have a couple of weeks’ on account this Saturday. She knows Friday’s pay-day, but I’ve buttered her up with a yarn about a Bank Holiday bonus. I’m racking my brains for some new fairy-tale. I can generally get round her by telling the old girl a funny story, and doing a funny act and getting her on the giggle. Get ’em on the giggle, and you’ve got ’em, but I’m not in the mood. I couldn’t make anybody laugh if I tickled them under the arms, not to-day – it’s too hot. . . . Laugh, clown, laugh! . . . said Mr. Trew to himself, with a brave smile, so pathetically that he drew from himself a tear of pity. . . . Pagliacci! To act with my heart maddened with sorrow, ha-ha! . . . All right! Go in. Letter in the rack – afraid to open it – most likely a bill. Feel it. Crackle-crackle. It doesn’t feel like a bill. Pluck up courage and open it. And lo and behold, somebody’s gone and left me fifty million pounds! God! . . .
Pretending to be busy at the filing cabinet, Mr. Trew played with the idea of w
riting himself such a letter on Pismire’s notepaper and brandishing it in the face of his landlady, for the sake of a few more days’ grace. But he reasoned that even the most skilful application of charm and the most carefully devised excuses could not procure him more than a week or ten days more credit in her house; for she was only half stupid, and really did owe rent to her landlord. Furthermore she knew where he worked. Mr. Trew’s instinct warned him that, easygoing as she was, his landlady might raise the devil if she felt that he had taken advantage of her credulity. She would come to the office, make a scene, and get him the sack.
No, it would not be honourable to play such a trick. . . . She’d come down on me like a sackful of wild cats. Oh, she was ready enough to let me cheer her up when she was depressed. She didn’t mind letting me talk myself hoarse, telling her fumy stories when she was crying her eyes out that Sunday when the bath overflowed.
Mr. Trew was thinking of a wretched affair; a little tragedy which his comic genius had transmuted into a good joke. Early in the spring his landlady had ordered a female tenant who claimed to be a milliner to leave the house at short notice. The milliner left, but before leaving she wedged the rubber stopper tightly into the plug-hole of the bath and turned both taps on full. The landlady, who was out shopping at the time, came back to find the plaster of the kitchen ceiling lying in four inches of water on the floor. The water had penetrated to her little sitting-room, and the carpet was ruined. Then all the miseries and humiliations of the past forty-five years came back in a rush. The poor old widow threw herself into a sodden stuffed chair, and wept helplessly. Mr. Trew, coming home just then, felt that it was necessary to do something. The landlady had a pin-cushion – a pathetic souvenir of some steamboat trip to Ramsgate – shaped like an old-fashioned life preserver. She had never stuck a pin into the red plush part of it, because it had a sentimental value: it stood on the mantelpiece close to a photograph of her husband as a young man. Mr. Trew hurled the pin-cushion at her, shouting: “Ahoy! Lusitania ahoy! Captain Trew to the rescue! Women and children first!” Then, sitting on the soaked carpet he pushed himself in her direction with his heels, pretending to pull imaginary oars. The pin-cushion fell into the water. The landlady looked at it and had hysterics. She laughed and cried at the same time. Her laughter was so piercing and so prolonged that Mr. Trew congratulated himself for having made the most successful joke of his career.
But when he repeated it, with embellishments, to friends in the City, drawing a ludicrous picture of the silly old fat lady shrieking in her chair with a life preserver no bigger than a saucer in her fat white hand, while he, the comedian, got up out of a puddle, nobody laughed until Ted Middleton said:
“You both had a good laugh, Trew, old man, but you were the only one that . . . made your trousers wet. Perhaps the old lady saw only half the joke.”
This was the only funny thing Middleton had ever said. Uttered as it was in his timorous, hesitant voice, it struck like a thunderbolt. There was a half-second of astounded silence, followed by a bellow of laughter that blew Trew’s narrative out of time and attention, and killed it for ever. He had lain awake half the night weighing every word and measuring every ludicrous angle of that story, for he was the acknowledged joker of the tea-and-bun shops around Cheapside, the Sidney Smith of the milk bars; an important man in his circle. His acquaintances enjoyed his company in the lunch-hour. He was free entertainment. There was no funny story that he did not know by heart. Consequently he found other men’s jokes curiously stale and dry. If, taking advantage of some few seconds of silence, while Trew’s mouth was full of pie or hot tea, one of his friends managed to tell a little story of his own, Trew generally looked blank, and said: “And what happened then?” Or: “I’m sorry, old man, I don’t think I quite get the point of that one . . . and that reminds me. Did you ever hear the one about the Irishman, the Scotchman, the Welshman, and the Jew? . . .”
He loved to tell stories in dialect, for he was proud of a certain knack of mimicry, and had a mobile, expressive face. As a caricaturist of deformity, he was unequalled; a young man whose mother had died the day before had forgotten his grief in a big laugh at Trew’s imitation of a man with a dislocated hip and a hare-lip. He was so popular that the proprietor of a certain Italian restaurant allowed him credit – Trew was always followed by so many younger men.
He had, as you will observe, a formidable reputation to maintain. To be funny all the time is the hardest work in the world, for a man who is not born with wit: the strain of it drives men mad. Days of knuckle-biting and feverish nights of intense thinking go to make the mildewed joke that raises the half-hearted laugh in the half-empty theatre in the provinces. Once in a blue moon a petty comedian happens upon something all his own, which strikes him as excruciatingly funny. Then, more often than not, this masterpiece, this calculated laugh-maker, is destroyed by something unpredictable. In a carefully-timed split second of silence, a miserable fly comes out of the tobacco smoke and tickles someone’s nose: there is a sneeze, and people laugh – at the wrong thing. Or perhaps some impatient person, determined to have his laugh in any case, lets out a mad guffaw, in which everyone else automatically joins, drowning the masterpiece in uproar. On such occasions, the bitterness of the jester is terrible, and his hate so murderous that, like Caligula, he wishes that the whole had had one throat, that he might cut it.
In such circumstances it is possible for a professional comedian to be philosophic. . . . The great joke fell flat in Manchester; well, it may hit a jackpot in Leeds, and if it falls in Leeds, there is always Birmingham, or Nottingham, or Bedford. But what is the comedian to do who has the same faithful audience of five or six, every day, day after day? He must bury his joke as dead; and he wishes that he might bury with it the mutilated corpse of the murderer that killed it.
Middleton had murdered Trew’s only original joke. Since everyone else was laughing, Trew laughed too, and cried: “Shake hands on that, old man – that was a good one!” When Middleton clasped his outstretched hand, Trew squeezed it, and Middleton uttered an astonished cry and started back, knocking over a glass of water; for Trew had concealed in his palm one of those little contraptions of clockwork that give the effect of an electric shock if they take you by surprise. Then the laugh was on Middleton. He, smiling foolishly, stood up and mopped spilt water from his trousers with his handkerchief.
“Are they wet enough for you now, Middy?” said Trew.
There was another roar of laughter, and for a moment Trew was almost grateful to Middleton for having unconsciously helped him to a new, unexpected climax. Then Middleton, in his artless, silly way, pointed to a little wet patch on his left knee and, letting the company see that his right leg was perfectly dry, said, with a giggle: “Look . . . He-he! . . . That was only half a joke, see?”
Heaven knows what there was to laugh at there, yet everyone laughed again. Trew squeezed the thin whey of sour, curdled laughter through tightly clenched teeth.
“Ten minutes to two,” said Middleton. “Back to the office, I suppose.”
Trew had heard a humorous character in an American film say: “Don’t take any flannel dimes.” This struck him as excruciatingly funny, and he had been storing it for use on some appropriate occasion. But now, demoralised as he was, he felt the need to improve on it, to give it local significance, and to bring it home to the hearts of unsophisticated young men who did not know what a dime was. At all costs Trew had to get the last laugh. “Well, old man,” he said, heartily, “don’t take any paper pound notes.”
Nobody laughed. The joke fell flat. The audience reasoned: since pound notes are made of paper, why should one not take them? Trew cursed himself. If he had said flannel pound notes, he might have raised that essential, memorable, conclusive laugh. Even Middleton said “Eh?” and looked blank, for he worked in the mail order department of Coulton Utilities: hundreds of pounds-worth of paper money passed through his hands every day.
If on
ly I had said “flannel postal orders”! thought Trew. He tried it:
“ – Or flannel postal orders.”
But it was too late. Only a junior clerk in an insurance company sniggered tentatively, as he always did when Trew said something. Trew went back to his desk. This had been one of the most miserable mornings of his life. That afternoon he made three foolish mistakes, through sheer inattention. His mind was not on his work; he was thinking of revenge.
Now a great comedian must be a great man – a man of fine instincts, because he must never hurt the weak, mock the noble, deface the beautiful, distort truth, or undermine virtue. Great comedians are honourable, merciful, intelligent, and selective in marksmanship. No missile in the world takes more careful aiming than a custard pie thrown at the right time to the right place. A great comedian, therefore, helps to destroy evil by making you laugh at a tyrant, a coward, a poseur, or a fool; if he wishes to attack the abject, he personifies himself as all that is despicable, and tears himself down. He does what he has to do the hard way, because great men naturally take the hard road. But may God save us all from the little would-be comedian; the one who says “Anything for a laugh”! He will dress in rags to make hunger despicable, or humiliate himself in a silk hat to make prosperity hateful. He will get a laugh out of you at all costs. Unsuccessful comedians are the unhappiest of men. Their unhappiness breeds malice – but their malice becomes madness. Would-be comedians are often mad. Their madness takes the easy way. Where a great comedian almost automatically tries to make you laugh yourself out of the misery of the world, a little comedian tries to make you feel strong by laughing at some degradation deeper than your own. A good comedian loves all laughter. A bad one despises any laughter that he has not personally provoked, and hates the man who dares to raise such laughter.