by Gerald Kersh
“Don’t interrupt,” said my mother.
“What you boys don’t see is the future; only the present. I’m no artist, as you know, and I don’t pretend to be a fortuneteller. But your silent days are over. There’s a new era developing. I give your show under a year.”
Inexpressibly irritated, I said, “Oh, so you give it such-and-such a time. You give it, do you? Much obliged. Now let me tell you—”
“Oh, don’t, don’t!” said my mother, beginning to
weep.
If Uncle Hugh had, at this point, broken a plate over my head, there might have been a certain catharsis, and we might have come to terms. Only he chuckled in his good-natured way; and this I found intolerable. He said, “I have certain contacts. It’s time you grew up—”
“Oh, no, Hugh, no!” my mother cried, putting the little finger of her right hand in her mouth and clutching her cheek with the other four.
Uncle Hugh was beginning, as the saying goes, to have about as much of this as he was prepared to take. He took out his big gold watch, flicked it open, closed one eye—drawing a bead on it rather than consulting it— snapped it shut, pocketed it, and said, “I will give you about six months.”
I said, “I have no faith in your time machines, sir, nor in your power to give me a month here or there.”
Then his good humor got the better of him and he said, “Oh, look here, Daniel. We all have our little Wars of Independence.’ All right, m’ boy, follow your star. Only mind that it isn’t a falling star. But if it is, come to me.”
Without saying anything I vowed that I would see him in hell first, and doubly so because he looked so calm and affable, and said, “Sow your wild Circulating Libraries.”
With this I decided to declare the vendetta against Uncle Hugh. And all of a sudden I felt a nostalgia for Yudenow and the Pantheon, and for Fowlers End, which Copper Baldwin described as “the arse hole of the universe.” The mud had become my home, and I wanted to go back to it. Meanwhile, whatever anybody said, right or wrong, I would say the opposite and fight for it too.
When I got up to go, Uncle Hugh came with me, saying, “Where was it you said you were going? Fowlers End, did you say? Why then, m’lad, take the Lanchester. Don’t argue now; take the limousine. I’ve got to talk to your mother. The chauffeur will whisk you there and get back in good time to pick me up. And look here, old boy—do believe me—silent pictures are dead. So are live variety turns. The sound systems, Dan, the sound systems have control of the future. I happen to know. Come to grief, if you must, my dear fellow, but for God’s sake do it in a businesslike way, and like a gentleman. Meanwhile (between ourselves) if you need anything, bless you, come to me and I’ll fix you up.” Then he said to his chauffeur, “Oh, Pearce, take Mr. Laverock to Fowlers End and come right back!”
Before I could think of anything to say, Uncle Hugh, holding up a folded bit of white paper, said, “A hole in your pocket? Or are you chucking it away?”
My pockets were always full of papers, so I took it automatically, shook hands with him mechanically, and got into his car. His chauffeur, who wore bottle-green livery, covered my knees with a rug and took my suitcase in front. We were well on our way north when it occurred to me to wonder what paper I might have dropped.
It was a twenty-pound note, folded small. Emotion overcame me. I got my money’s worth out of Godbolt’s miserable handkerchief before I got back to the Pantheon at nightfall.
The great Lanchester pulled up close behind Sam Yudenow’s Renault. Uncle Hugh’s chauffeur unwrapped me and carried my suitcase into the vestibule. I knew that I was being watched and overheard, so I drew myself up and said, “Thank you. Better go home now.”
Then, when the Lanchester withdrew its nose from the butt of Yudenow’s car and swung away with a gentlemanly growl of disgust, Yudenow came out from behind a curtain with his hands clasped behind him and said, “All the time I knew you were a gentleman in disguise. Meanwhile this won’t butter the baby’s drawers. Copper’s having trouble miv the genevator room and Dilly is back miv a pal. Valor is the better part of discretion, and I got trouble miv my nostrils. Behind the curtain I had to watch operations from—and oh my Christ, do they need a dusting! Come in, quick. In the case of Dilly and his pal, for God’s sake, be diplomatic. Put your arms rahnd their necks like a brother— a long-lost brother—then bang their heads together with all your might. After which, a grip of the hand under the ears, run them out of the show as fast as my legs will carry you, and into the rain miv ‘em. What are you waiting for?”
They came quietly enough. I had them out of the place in thirty seconds. Dilly’s friend must have been respectable, for I found a ready-made tie and a celluloid collar afterward.
Having seen them off the premises, I looked at and inhaled the desolation of Fowlers End. As usual a corrosive rain was falling; but now something had gone wrong with the sulphuric-acid factory, the smoke of whose chimneys was green. “By any chance, did you bring back any more of those cigars?” Sam Yudenow asked, and when I said that I had forgotten, he said, “A fine way to get on in show biz!” Two young women had a fingernail fight over a young fellow I would not have given you twopence for, using language which I wish I might print. Copper Baldwin came from the generator room and said, “Okay, Yudenow. This is straight, and I’m telling you. You don’t get a new genny, I’m warning you, there’s going to be another bloody Paisley Disaster in this gaff!”
“Why should you talk like that?” asked Sam Yudenow. “I’m only human. Disasters come from God. You’re only saying it to upset me.... Aha!”—for young Johnny Headlong was in with a tray slung round his neck, fitted with soggy oval objects, each of which seemed to emit the concentrated odor of a fifth-rate boarding house on a humid night in August. You go into the passage and it strikes you—“Aha! Greenburgers—the first batch. Have one?”
Copper Baldwin said, “For Christ’s sake, talk sense. Have one! Look at young Johnny—brought up on skilly an’ ‘e goes black in the face at the smell.”
“Believe me, Copper, there is no more filling twopenn’ orth in town,” said Yudenow. “If so, name it and I’ll give you a fi’-pun note!”
“You mean that?”
“Are you making me out to be a twicer?” “Well then, try ‘alf a pound o’raw rice and a pint of ‘ot water.”
Yudenow said, “Don’t be silly. Take one, Copper— to please me!”
Dreamily, Copper Baldwin said to the ceiling, “Ever sleep in a fivepenny kip rahnd Seven Dials, in the season when they’re chucking out spoiled cabbages in the garden? The down-and-outs can cook their own grub, if they got any, on the stove. So there’s bad fat—you know, stale lard what’s been used twenty-five times for sausages, and bloaters, and bits o’ bacon, and kippers, and warmed-up chops somebody found in a swill bin before the pigman came to collect, and kept all day in ‘is trousers pocket. To stay their stomachs, this lumpenproletariat ‘as been at the spoiled cabbage, raw, and saved the rest for frying. Arterwards, when they lean back and decide among themselves whether they should withdraw from India, or somethink, there comes what they call the wind session. They make a pool: sixpence for the one that can fart the loudest, while they all light up pipes and cigarettes made of dog ends three times rerolled and dry their wet toe rags and boots.... Well, that’s what this Greenburger smells like. Take it away!”
“I’m saying, ‘Please, Copper!’ You don’t know what this means to me.” Yudenow had already pressed one into my hand. “See? Mr. Laveridge has got one. Try a taster.”
Copper Baldwin took one, sniffed at it, and said, “Filling is right. One niff, and I don’t think I’ll ever eat again as long as I live. Why don’t you eat one, Yudenow?”
“Because the effect of these nourishing Greenburgers is, I wouldn’t be able to eat my supper and my wife don’t like me to eat out.... What about you, Mr. Lavendorf? Eat up!” His manner was almost obsequious, but he tried to make it offhand as he asked, “The car miv the shofar—whose
is it?”
“Oh, the Lanchester, you mean?” I said. “Oh, that belongs to one of my uncles.”
“What does he do?” asked Sam Yudenow. “Because, believe me, a motorcar of that description they don’t give away for twenty-five coupons out of packets cigarettes.”
“He is in the City,” I said.
To change the subject, I put my Greenburger into his gesticulating right hand, took out the twenty-pound note, and said, “That reminds me. Got change for a twenty?”
He had the day’s takings in one of those locked leather bags—such as bank messengers carry—chained to his wrist, but he said, “Tomorrow.”
On a sudden impulse, I asked him, “Mr. Yudenow, what made you leave the fish business?”
He said, “Confidentially between us, believe me, there’s no future in fish. But in show biz, for an ambitious man, there’s a future, romance. Look at Hyman Melville. If he’d stayed in fish, he’d still be pushing a barrow and shouting his bloody guts out. Whereas, he goes into show biz and makes Moby Dick miv John Barrymoor; and you should be in such a nice position he’s in now!”
“For Christ’s sake, shut up and let me close down!” shouted Copper Baldwin.
“Did I say something?” asked Sam Yudenow. But as he hurried out, he called over his shoulder, “Get those curtains brushed, Copper—there has been malingering here. Good night all.”
Then Copper Baldwin and I closed the Pantheon and put up the bars.
“Now, before we go to Uncle Ned,” said Copper Baldwin, “lets ‘ave something to take away the taste of them Greenburgers,” and he produced half a bottle of gin and a paper bag—the latter with an apologetic air. “I got a sweet tooth. I never ‘ad enough sweet stuff when I was a nipper, and sometimes I get a craving....” He offered me the bottle and then, with infinite care, took out of the paper bag three large meringues. Thereupon, uncontrollably, I laughed as I had not laughed for what seemed to me a donkey’s age. The reverberations of that laugh went flapping and echoing in the empty hall until the whole of that squalid interior seemed to shake with the nameless enjoyment of some dimly understood joke and to laugh with me just for the sake of laughing, like a factory girl on a bank holiday.
I have never felt more pleasantly relaxed than I did in that few moments. It is for this kind of thing that your Faustuses are prepared to sell their gray old souls; only for convenience’s sake the dramatists call it youth.
10
THERE WAS no use talking: much as I hated to admit it, Uncle Hugh was right. “Live” variety and silent films were in the dumps, and the electricians and the renters, and the distributors and the bankers were taking over. The ones I pitied most were the old music-hall stars who had been idols in their day—whose names are still bywords among those who are old enough to remember them—who had rushed from music hall to theater and from theater to music hall without wiping off their make-up, putting on five or six acts a night. They earned up to a hundred pounds a week (which, at the turn of the century, was a fortune) and cast it to the hangers-on. Always, in their minds, was the memory of what they had suffered before what they called “Luck” had got them out of the gutter. In their heyday nobody had to ask them twice for a pound to tide him over. But when times changed, it was terrible to see the empty despair of entertainers whom everybody had known compelled to repeat their names two or three times—what time they showed cuttings from newspapers long since dead, or absorbed—to a new generation of agents and managers of such places as the Pantheon.
Leo Dryden, the man who sang “Don’t Go Down in the Mine, Daddy” and lorded it around Leicester Square in his time, came to sing his old songs on our sad little stage— but that which had made him a kind of Al Jolson in the 1890s raised nothing but derisive laughs in Fowlers End in my time. The old comedians were laughed at, too. But for the wrong reasons. The laughter of the mob is a terrifying thing. If it is aroused, say, by Charlie Chaplin as a comedian, well and good. But if the mob laughs at Charlie Chaplin for being a comedian, why, then you hear the howl and see the bared teeth and the curled lip; and you perceive the cruelty that is fundamental to most mirth.
Comedians, above all men, are sensitive to laughter. Look at poor old T. E. Dunville, the king of clowns in the days of the music halls. When variety was at its very last gasp, somebody had the idea of resuscitating him, and he went on at the Stoll Theater in St. Martin’s Lane with his old routine. He sang, in his machine-gun style, a song that had convulsed the nation:
Every time he moved his pants went
Poppety-poppety-pop ...
—which had to do with a man in a ready-made suit which had shrunk in the rain. And the audience laughed. But there was a derisive quality in their laughter, and comedians are not to be laughed at. So T. E. Dunville left the theater with dignity, and drowned himself in the Thames.
I had the handling of such stars, who were trying in their old age to ward off the ineluctable f ailing leaves of the calendar.... I had a dignified old gentleman, in all that was left of a magnificent overcoat with an astrakhan collar, who had been famous for his impersonations of Sir Henry Irving. He insisted on buying me a cigar with his last sixpence to soften me for a loan of five shillings for something to eat. They laughed at him. When I went into the men’s dressing room and saw him crying into his hands, I took out one of Uncle Hugh’s pounds and gave it to him, saying, “My dear sir, we are enthusiastic! This is a bonus. Congratulations!” Then he cheered up and seemed to put on weight, and went away in high spirits.
Again, gallant in her old age, came one of those corseted and curved ladies like Maidie Scott, who used to sing “I’m One of the Ruins That Cromwell Knocked About a Bit.” Thirty years before, with a thirty-eight-inch bust, twenty-inch waist, and forty-four-inch hips—sixteen-and-a-half-inch calf, twenty-four-inch thigh—a royal duke stood her a nebuchadnezzar of Veuve Cliquot champagne. Now she was a huge, haggard matron; and when she came on, wearing a stuffed chicken on her head and singing:
You don’t know Mary like I do,
Said the naughty little bird on Mary’s hat...
they laughed again, but in the wrong places, the yobbos. I gave her a bonus, too....
Yet, with the business manifestly gone to the dogs, there were innumerable able-bodied men and women struggling to get into it. Thank God for this, for such is the spirit of man: he must give his lifeblood to the dying.
Once the agent Billy Bax (Sam Yudenow left the bookings to him) sent me a double-turn, Franky and Johnnie. The female half of this team turned up with the agent’s slip. She was a pretty young woman, not more than twenty-five years old, but already showing signs of want and wear. She asked me breathlessly, “You know who we are? Franky and Johnnie? Song and dance act? Franky’s my husband. We live off the Vauxhill Bridge Road. I walked all the way. Could you advance me ten shillings for his poor old bus fare, because he really does try so hard?”
“With pleasure, ma’am,” I said, and did so out of Uncle Hugh’s pocket. When her husband turned up, he was carrying a baby about eight months old. He was one of those blond, nervous, petulant, willowy men with an expression female novelists generally describe as “sensitive.”
“What do you propose to do with the baby?” I asked.
Quick as a bird the woman said, “Oh, we’ll only be on ten minutes. Perhaps somebody could hold him for me. Only ten minutes, sir, only ten minutes.”
“What the devil is Billy Bax sending me?” I cried. “With Charing Cross Road crawling with talent out of work—”
“Ssh! You’ll wake up Charley. Swear not to tell,” she said, in her breathless way. “Franky was getting so discouraged he said he would end it all. And Mr. Bax ... well, you know, he’s a very passionate man. So, you know? But it doesn’t mean anything really. There’s no way of getting a foothold, unless ...”
Thus, their baby was held, not by me but by a nursing mother who, as she said, “knew what it was.” She was right in the front, in the fivepennies. Giving the child one of her b
reasts to chew on, she settled down to enjoy herself while Franky and Johnnie—as if I hadn’t guessed—sang “Frankie and Johnny Were Lovers.”
I was glad to get rid of them, but at the same time I swore the blood feud against Billy Bax. I swore to myself that when I met him he should have the rough edge of my tongue and the back of my hand right in the middle of his horrid face, which I visualized as flabby, sodden like wet blotting paper, its grayness relieved by the blood in his eye and the strawberry color of his blubbery lips. He would be about fifty-five years old....
But one day there came into the vestibule a tall, slim man with a sly, ingratiating manner, dressed in a ten-guinea chalk-stripe suit not much the worse for wear and pointy tan shoes. His cuffs came down to his knuckles, and his collar was of the pattern popularized by the Prince of Wales, as he was then, before we stopped loving him. His hat was a homburg. You could have put the knot of his tie into a thimble. As for his face: it was an animated Rake’s Progress. Under and over prominent watery brown eyes I saw a concentricity of black bags. Hard as he might try, he couldn’t keep the muscles of his face in equilibrium. Knowing when these muscles were getting out of control, but unable to keep them in check, he occasionally let them go in a fireworks display of confidential winks and whimsical grimaces.
As my mother would have said, he didn’t look a bit well. There was something about his posture that made me feel uneasy—he was too animated from the waist up and too deliberate from the hips down. Also, he punctuated his sentences with prefabricated laughter.
“Here’s a list for Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday,” he said, with a hearty laugh. “Jacob and the Angel, Eccentric Dancers, ha-ha-ha! Two single turns—The Tramp Juggler and Gritto, The Man Who Eats Bricks, ha-ha-ha! Well, as it happens, Gritto broke a tooth in Brixton, ha-ha-ha, so in order not to let Sam Yudenow down, I decided at the last moment to dub. Got it? I’m Billy Bax, Song and Dance— what’s the odds so long as you’re happy?—that’s my line, ha-ha-ha! ... Look here, let’s have a pound on account, will you?”