by Gerald Kersh
Then he stepped aside and stopped a little woman who was carrying in her arms a thirteen-year-old boy wrapped in a shawl, and said, “Now then, Missis—you put ‘im down, will you? Gawd suffering blimey, Mr. Laverock! Keep your eye on this one. What they won’t do for a free ticket! Parasites, malingerers, skivers, scroungers. Down with the bloody working classes!” he shouted. “Down with the King, down with the Queen, up the Bolsheviks, labor camps and castor oil for ever! If it comes to breeding, oh, Jesus, give me fruit flies every time!... Come on, you stinkpots, it’s your money we want, it’s your money we want!”
A rebellious old man, hobbling in a network of gray veins that stood out like vines on a sapped jungle tree, growled, “And it’s my money you’ll get, you cheeky little bugger!”
Copper Baldwin yelled at him: “That’s about enough of that! I don’t mind telling you, Mr. Laverock’s got his eye on you, and if you’re not bloody careful ‘e’ll bar you. And you can go to Ullage for your Greta Garbo. Now then.”
“I never said nothing,” the old man said.
“Well, don’t say it again. What, I wish I ‘ad you in Russia. Euthanasia you’d get, not Greta Garbo. Where’s your bloody economic value, you and your Greta Garbo? Answer me that! Believe me, you wouldn’t last five minutes with me in Italy, you bleeding ulcer on the body politic. Greta Garbo, I ask you!”
The old man shook with impotent rage, and it seemed that his veins swelled, but he said nothing. He wanted to see Greta Garbo in Wild Orchids.
“‘Ow old are you?” asked Copper Baldwin.
Itching to get into the cinema, the old man said, “Seventy-two.”
Copper Baldwin said, “By rights, your expectation of life is fifty-two years, you layabout. In the Ideal State, gorblimey, I’d ave ‘ad you in a lethal chamber twenty years ago. No shame, no social sense. Look at yourself. Three square meals a day for seventy-two years, and what ‘as the state got to show for you? Greta Garbo in Wild Orchids. Oh, you bloody vampire, you!” Then he whispered to me, “Give ‘im a complimentary ticket.”
Complimentary ticket for this gentleman, Mrs. Edwards,” I said. She tore one off a roll and gave it to the old man, who didn’t know what to do with it. There was something like a game of draughts at the box office with his pennies until, at last, he took back his money and shambled into the hall muttering,”... Too old a bird to be caught wiv chaff.... They gives you fourpence, and they takes a shilling.... Jews are the ruination—Jews and the underground railways.”
“Why underground railways?” I asked, thinking aloud.
Copper Baldwin said, “Why not? You’ve got a lot to learn, son, about the bloody proletariat. Call a meeting, give everybody a cup o’ cocoa and a bun, and say, ‘The trouble with the world today is ‘orses,’ and you’ll get results. Oh, Christ, ‘ow I ‘ate the working classes!”
“And the ruling classes?” I asked.
“That’s what I mean,” said Copper Baldwin, “the iron ‘eel o’ the working classes (so-called) on the neck o’ civilization and individual liberty. Cancer in the family— working classes. Strength goes to support weakness. ‘Ealth kills itself for disease. There’s your benevolent-bloody-state.”
“Copper,” I said, “to which class do you belong?”
He replied, “No class. I wear no man’s collar, son. My mother was a finder o’ the pure. My grandfather—”
Then Mrs. Maybrick, the grisly beldam who was called “Chief Usherette” came to the vestibule very agitated and said, “I’m sorry, sir, but young Dilly is making trouble. Would you kindly reprimand him, or eject him, sir?”
Copper Baldwin said, “You don’t want to be afraid of Dilly. All pastry and coconut. Don’t eject ‘im, son. Chuck ‘im out, in plain English.”
“He got in without a ticket,” said Mrs. Maybrick. “Oh, I knew, I knew, but when I asked him he told me to go and something myself. If you want him out of here, he said, you and who else can something well come and fetch him. He keeps whistling.”
I said, “Actually, shouldn’t there be a doorman for this kind of thing?”
Mockingly, Copper Baldwin said, “Actually, yes, but...” Then he went on to explain that Sam Yudenow staffed his cinemas—which were where he found them, in the unlikeliest places—with the leavings, the droppings, of the population. Recently, he told me, Yudenow had haggled with Hacker the Breaker over a set of jazz-patterned glass panels which, if you put a revolving electric light behind them, could turn a flea pit into a super cinema at the snap of a switch. Four pounds the lot. Only Sam Yudenow had managed to get Hacker the Breaker to include, in this deal, a uniform—bankrupt stock from High Life Film Studios out at Acton—which had been designed for the man who played the Duke of Wellington in one of their productions. The producer had taken it into his head that the Iron Duke was six and a half feet tall. Stopping me short when I protested that Wellington was a skinny little fellow, considerably under the average height, Copper Baldwin said, “Yes, I know; he was half-arsed. So was Nelson. But look at Nelson’s Column. What d’you expect? Suckers, suckers for their own tit. I mean to say, it stands to reason. ‘You must ‘ave faith in your own product,’ they say. But I ask you, son, ‘ow does that work out? Like this: Develop an appetite for your own crap. That’s all. Sell yourself on your own trailers. Believe me, the best producer or exhibitor is the proto-bloody-type of ‘is own best customer. ‘Istory is bunk; the Duke o’ Wellington stood six foot six; and Bob’s your uncle.... But as I was saying, it ain’t worth Yudenow’s while to fit a uniform to a man—it’s cheaper to fit a man to a uniform. The Turners Green ‘Ippodrome, which is a quiet ‘ouse, ‘as got Napoleon. Procrustean, bloody procrustean!... Meanwhile, chuck that Dilly out.”
So, uncomfortably aware of the beating of my heart, I followed Mrs. Maybrick down the dark aisle. The offensive Dilly had made himself comfortable in the middle part of the hall. Tapping him on the shoulder, I said, “Excuse me, may I see your ticket stub?” Then Dilly made the kind of sucking, squeaking noise old ladies make when they call cats and said, in a mincing voice, “Oh, stop it, Horace darling!” So I had to throw him out.
I invited him to step into the aisle and be thrown out like a gentleman. He would not. He made a circle of the thumb and the forefinger of his left hand into which he inserted the first two fingers of his right, while, with tongue and lips, he made a loud noise. From all over the hall people began to complain. I got into the row behind him and took his throat in the crook of my arm, dragging him into the aisle. His trousers held as I lifted him off the ground. Not knowing what to do with him then, I carried him into the vestibule, where Copper Baldwin was waiting.
“Like this?” I asked.
Copper Baldwin’s mouth twitched a little, but his stomach heaved with laughter. He said, “Better let him down.”
Dilly sprawled on the floor, gasping. I picked him up and shook him. “You know,” I said to him, “you’re supposed to pay for your ticket, and not to whistle.... Mrs. Edwards, please give this gentleman a complimentary ticket.” But young Dilly blinked at me and, easing his neck by a series of gyrations, went quietly out into the street.
Copper Baldwin said, “All right. The arse o’ the trousers is good psychology.”
“Sam Yudenow told me—”
“Don’t be silly,” I told Sam Yudenow! ”Read your Von Clausewitz, read your Falkenhayn. Go for the weak spot. Not more than three in five round Fowlers End ‘ave got an arse to their trousers. Remember that. Those three are scar tissue, if you like. Say you’ve ‘ad your appendix out and it’s just sewn up, and I make a feint at you. Where will your guard drop to? Your belly. That’s ‘ow it is ‘ere, with the arse o’ the trousers. But remember, everybody in Fowlers End wears a muffler, and there’s a vulnerable point, son. Go for that choker and twist it. Whatever the bastards breathe, they can’t do without it for long. In the ‘ot weather, ‘it ‘em in the kidneys. They’re ain’t a ‘ole pair o’kidneys in Fowlers End. But you shouldn’t ‘ave offered young Dilly a co
mplimentary.... But wait about a bit. The turns should be turning up about now.”
He took from Mrs. Edwards a fragment of paper upon which were listed our “Live Bookings” for the next three days. At the top of this list stood the name of:
Johnny Mayflower, Trick Skater
But this was crossed out in blue pencil, and close beneath it was written, in violet ink:
Canceled—pawned skates; substitute
Johnny Lambsbreath, the Man Who Made the Prince of Wales Laugh
Copper Baldwin said, “That was Edward VII, when ‘e was Prince of Wales. Oh, the poor bastard! Now this next one, Sam Yudenow will turn up for ...” He put his thumb on:
Eena, Oriental Contortionist
“Oh, ‘e loves ‘em, ‘e loves ‘em, them Oriental contortionists! And last, but not least, the Double Turn...”
Hanky and Panky, Eccentric Dancers
“Don’t worry, son. Show ‘em where they dress, and et cetera. One o’ these days we must ‘ave a real intellectual conversation, but in the meantime better let me give you a few wrinkles in applied psychology. Just be calm, look everybody straight in the face, and say nothing. Look at it this way: if you do ‘em a good turn, they think you want something out of ‘em; if you don’t do ‘em a good turn, they think you already done ‘em a bad ‘un. You can’t lay down law, bylaw, formula, rule, or regulation. Do nothing, but do it at the right moment. There’s the royal road, son, when the last comes to the last. But if you’ve got to do something positive, follow your intuition; and then do it as if your life depended on it. Which it will, son. See what I mean?”
I thought it polite to say “I see what you mean.”
But I did not see what he meant, for the time being. He continued: “Gawd give me fruit flies! ‘Ere’s where the ‘uman element’s always got you bolloxed. Destiny depends on the individual. Lenin, Mussolini, me—too many of us. The trouble with the world today is, a bloody sight too many chromosomes flying about all over the place. Spermatozoa, et cetera, swarms of ‘em, in every yob in Fowlers End. And to every tart that’ll come into the generator room with you, ova. It makes you think, don’t it? Gawd give me fruit flies! I’d ration their eggs, I would!”
I said, “Can’t very well, can you?”
Copper Baldwin said, “No, I know. But I would if I could.”
“Be God Almighty?” I asked.
“Why,” said he, “what does young Dilly, for example, want with spermatozoa? Are you aware—I’m not pretending to give you the right figures—that in about ninety years from now that layabout Dilly will have devoured about a quarter of the earth’s surface, or something like that, ‘im and ‘is spermato-bloody-zoa? Aquick X ray right in the testicles, and sterilize the buggers.”
“And what business had your mother with an ovum?” I asked provocatively.
“You wait and see. You’d laugh if you knew,” said Copper Baldwin. “Now that I come to think of it, if you imagine you’ve seen the end-all of everything—talking o’ variety turns—wait till you meet Billy Bax the Agent. Wickedness. It works by kind o’ centripetal force. It rushes in on itself and makes an ‘ard lump. With the possible exception o’ ‘Acker the Breaker, Billy Bax the Agent is about the only man in the world Sam Yudenow looks up to.”
“How’s that?”
“Because Billy Bax the Agent is a bit lower than ‘imself, so ‘e looks up to ‘im. Wrong end o’ the telescope, get me? The cosmos upsy-down.... Meanwhile, better ring Sam Yudenow—I daresay ‘e already give you the office— about the Chinese contortionist. You know the signals? The password is generator room—do you fluff?”
I said, “I fluff, Copper.”
The manager’s office was a kind of cubicle between the rewinding room and the ice-cream machine. It was furnished with the skimmings of some of Hacker the Breaker’s job lots—a boule table, an Elizabethan ash tray left over from a bankrupt production about Sir Walter Raleigh, a chaise longue of the Second Empire, one of the earliest Japanese imitations of an old American typewriter that had as many keys as a calculating machine, and a telephone upon which Sam Yudenow had evidently been trying out some silver paint so that it had a flaky and leprous look about it. I got Sam Yudenow’s number and told him that there was trouble in the generator room.
He replied, cryptically, “More tvouble again? Who miv, this time?”
I said, “Contortionist.”
He sounded brisk, businesslike; one could recognize that he was talking for the benefit of a third party. The tone of his voice was such that I could not tell whether he was admonishing me, or giving me a secret signal, or making a burlesque. He said, “Mr. Daniels! Whereas you are raw to this business, Sam Yudenow wants you should work your way up thvough its bottom. You should understand, Rome wasn’t built mivout tvouble in the genevator room. A vose by any other name would smell. But what’s the billing?”
I said, as quietly as possible, “Chinese contortionist, name of Eena.”
Then he said, with asperity—I could almost see him flapping about with his free hand—“Take a scvewdriver. Are you there?”
“Yes, I’m here.”
“That’s not what I asked. Are you there? ... Right. Praps I’ll look in, in an hour or two. I’m making allowances, mind you, because you’re new. But... when I was your age, the scvewdrivers wasn’t even insulated yet. Genevator rooms! What, again, is the nature of the tvouble?”
Losing patience, I said, “Eena, the Chinese contortionist.”
“‘Ow many you got in the house?”
“A matter of a hundred or so,” I said.
“I’m ruined,” said Sam Yudenow. Then, in a very meaning voice, “I’ll get along as soon as I can, about the genevator room. See that everything is in order, but do nothing until I come. Any tvouble yet?”
“Chucked out a fellow called Dilly,” I said.
He replied, “Then you’ve as good as signed my death warrant.... You can’t turn your back five minutes. Hang up the receiver, Laventry. Do you vealize that all this chatter is costing me a bill? A thing you should vealize. If possible be like Shakespeare—no speeches—a word of one syllabub. One-two-thvee, and every picture tells a story. I’ll be right over. So what are you sitting there talking for? Count tukheses—uxcuse the expression, I mean arse holes—you should know what you got in every seat. Why ain’t you downstairs? Answer me.”
“Because I am talking to you upstairs,” I said.
“You go down and leave that genevator room to
me.”
I rang off. By the time I got downstairs the extension phone in the box office was ringing. Mrs. Edward said, “Mr. Yudenow on the phone—urgent.”
I shouted into the mouthpiece, “Well?”
“Where are you?”
“In the lobby.”
“Vestibule! Good-by.”
Some more people were coming in. The ticket machine went wrong: it made a noise like a hacking cough which gradually muffled itself until it became mute; whereupon Copper Baldwin discovered that, one of the tickets having got bent, some scores of others, blindly following it, had made what he called a “raffle” just under the slit where they were supposed to come out. The grinding urge of the powerful machinery had reduced these tickets to shreds, which we had to sweep up and put into a bag to satisfy Inland Revenue on entertainments tax.
Meanwhile there slunk into the Pantheon a middle-aged man of indeterminable race. He was about five feet tall, and of the color of an old penny—repellent in his expression, which was at once abject and arrogant, ingratiating and sullen. The whites of his eyes were brown, and his lips were a crusty purple. He was buttoned to the neck in a sad old velvet-collared coat and wore a bowler hat. He had no teeth.
“What can I do for you?” I asked.
He put down the Gladstone bag he was carrying (I thought he was going to try to sell me a fire extinguisher) and, thrusting a skinny hand under his clothes, started as it seemed to pick at himself as you do when your skin is peeling after scarlet fever
. He had the same rapt expression. He paused for an instant to lift his hat and scratch his glabrous head with one finger before he offered me his card. It read:
EENA, THE CHINESE CONTORTIONIST
FACIAL CONTORTIONS
WORLD-WIDE IMPERSONATIONS
“How do you do?” I said.
“I walked all the way from Brixton,” said Eena, the Contortionist, in anything but a Chinese accent. “Anywhere I can cop a kip for half an hour?”
Copper Baldwin said, “You can lie down in the gents’ dressing room for ‘alf an hour if you like, Mr. Laverock says. I take it you are male and not female?”
Eena said, “I got a wife and six children. Can I sub ten bob?”
“Mr. Laverock will let you ‘ave two tosheroons, if you like.... You are prepared to let this artiste ‘ave two ‘alf crowns on account, ain’t you, Mr. Laverock?” I observed that Copper Baldwin seemed to be enjoying himself. He patted Eena on the shoulder and said to Mrs. Edwards, “Five shillings advance for Eena, Mr. Laverock says. Mr. Laverock will sign the chit.” Then, to Eena, the Contortionist: “Mr. Laverock says, where’s your note from Billy Bax?” He took the soiled slip of paper which Eena scratched out of himself and handed it to me. I gave it to Mrs. Edwards, who put it on a spike.
The feel of a few shillings in his hand worked wonders with Eena. He said, in the manner of a temperamental star, “O’course, I shall want a consultation with your musical director. I got my music with me. I’ll need to give him his cues. When I say ‘Dracula’ I want a bit o’ Grieg, and’ a green spot on my face. Et cetera. And when I cover the whole of my nose with my lower lip—”