Neither Man Nor Dog

by Gerald Kersh

  “But a man who has learned all about women in his youth and maturity, he may marry with his eyes open and be happy, as I am. Commerson says: Marriage is often but ennui for two. So it is. But I have found my ideal.

  “I travelled the whole world in search of her. The variety is infinite. That is why, in seeking a mate, a man cannot be too careful. It is important to discover the one perfect combination. Just as an infinitesimally slight difference in the shape of a key will render it unfit to open a door, so a tiny variation in character may make a wife impossible to live with.

  “I know a man who would have forgiven infidelity, but who attempted to assassinate his wife because, in squeezing toothpaste, she invariably started the tube in the middle and not at the end.

  “Pay attention to every detail of the woman you think you love. It is easy to be deceived by a worthless woman. The destiny of woman is to please, to be amiable, to be loved, says Rochebrune. But by whom? That is the point.

  “Somewhere there is a perfect mate for every man. She may take long to find. As I said, I was fifty-five when I met mine. I had known innumerable women, and found them all wanting. But one evening at a party such as this I realised that, at last, the great thing had happened. I felt a pang of realisation as soon as I saw her. A blind understanding warned me that she was sublime. She was an American, but had lived for several years in Europe, travelling much, learning much. She had even written a book.

  “And while Karr says: A woman who writes commits two sins: she increases the number of books, and decreases the number of women, my love was utterly womanly.

  “She had intellect, yet was feminine. She had beauty, and intelligence. She was of a happy temperament, yet calm and sweet. Her manners were gracious and perfect. She was wise and kind. And her personality was as vivid as the dawn.

  “I begged her to marry me, and after a long time, succeeded in making her my wife. And time, my friend, has improved her sterling qualities. That was five years ago. I had passed five years in Paradise, and love her more and more every day.

  “So. Now you, my friend, were speaking bitterly of all woman­kind on account of the screaming antics of some debased creature inside, there.

  “Yet my wife is also a woman. There are women and women. Do not be like Boucicault, who said: I wish Adam had died with all his ribs in his body. Seek, and you shall find perfection. Now, let us go in. That unpleasant person has stopped her screeching, and my wife is waiting for me somewhere . . .”

  Kyak-yak-yak-yak-yak came the voice of the woman with banana-­coloured hair, from whom people were still flying in terror.

  “Is that woman never going to shut her mouth?” I said.

  “But the singing has stopped.”

  “Singing? Singing! I refer,” I said, “to that canary-headed hag flopping about the sofa like a filleted hippopotamus.”

  Something struck my chin. It was my companion’s fist.

  “Sir,” he said, his eyes blazing, “that lady is my wife.”

  Fantasy of a Hunted Man

  In Kentucky, in the year 1918, there lived a ferocious old man who was known as the Major. I suppose he was of the kind that carves out empires and breaks open new territories. He was indomitable, wiry, strong as steel in spite of his sixty years, and devoid of fear. An admirable, though far from lovable man, he lived alone, deeply respected and half feared by everybody who knew him. He was something of a madman, terrifying in his fanatical devotion to anything he regarded as his duty. The Major belonged to the hard old days when men, single-handed, fought wildernesses and beat them tame.

  Into his battered, lion-like head, there had crept the craziness of race-hate. He loathed foreigners, and abhorred negroes, and was always to be found in the forefront of any demonstration against the unhappy black men of Kentucky—a figure of terror, with his rifle, and his great moustache which curved down like a sharp sickle, and his huge and glaring blue eyes.

  That kind of fanaticism seems to bubble dangerously near the surface of the Deep South. A word cracks the skin over it, and lets loose an eruption of murder and cruelty.

  One day, a hysterical woman said that she had been accosted by a negro named Prosper. He had, in fact, asked her some question pertaining to firewood; but she had run, screaming for help. (That happens frequently.) She ran, I say, screaming. The drowsy little town seemed to start and blink. The negroes knew what that meant, and they trembled. Somebody passed a word to Prosper. He knew that innocence was no argument: he was a negro black as night, and therefore damned before judgment. He took to the woods, flying from what he knew must come.

  A great mutter rose. Men clustered, tense and angry. Mouths twitched up in snarls. Beware of the undercurrent of blood-lust that crawls in the depths of men! Somebody yelled: “Are we going to let that nigger get away with this?” A hundred other voices roared: “No!” The mutter of the mob became a howl, like that of mad dogs. Guns came down from hooks. Night had fallen. Torches flared. Two great bloodhounds, straining at their leashes, snuffled on the trail of Prosper. The men followed the dogs. The mob was out for blood and torture. And the Major led them, with a gun loaded with buckshot under his arm.

  But Prosper had a long start, and he knew the woods. The mob hunted all night long, and far into the next day. Then they became exhausted, and paused. But not the Major. He was drunk with hate. When everybody rested, he went on alone. He plunged into the depths of the wood. His long legs had the loping stride of a hunting wolf. The trees covered him. He disappeared.

  And two days later he appeared again, and it seemed that he had gone quite mad. He was afraid! He cringed. He staggered towards some people who were watching him, and said: “I didn’t do it! I never done nothing! I’m a harmless old nigger! Don’t hurt me, white folks! Please don’t hurt me!”

  Then he fell into a sleep, so deep that it was almost a death. And when he awoke, twelve hours afterwards, he was the Major again . . . but changed. He was quiet and gentle. He blinked uncertainly—he who had never been uncertain of anything, right or wrong, in sixty years of life—he who had never uttered a kind word in living memory. The Major, the nigger-hater, the lynch-lawyer, the whipper, the killer—the Major was seen gently patting the head of a terrified little black boy who stood paralysed with fear under the unexpected caress.

  What had happened to him in that dark forest?

  One day he told the story:

  When the others had rested he had gone on, and on, until he could walk no longer. His body was exhausted; but not his hate. He determined to rest a little, and then continue his hunt for the vanished negro Prosper. And as he sat resting, sleep came down on him like a deadfall, and he lay among the leaves and snored.

  But it was no ordinary sleep. It was a strange kind of sick coma in which the Major found himself. He was caught in the meshes of a dark and nightmarish dream, like a bird in a net. He knew that he was dreaming, and struggled to awake, but could not. And then he found himself floating away . . . and there was a blank, a hiatus, a timeless silence.

  He awoke. He found himself crouching in a thicket, in a part of the wood which he did not know. And his heart was thumping in his breast, and he was terrified, disgustingly terrified of something that was following him. The Major was bewildered. He had never known fear, and now he was afraid. He somehow knew that he was going to a hollow beyond the thicket. Something was urging him there. He knew, also, that dawn was at hand, and he dreaded the dawn . . . and yet he also dreaded the dark.

  He had lost his rifle. His clothes seemed to have been torn to shreds by thorns. His face was swollen where branches had snapped back at him in his headlong rush through the wood.

  He crawled on, footsore and exhausted. Prosper! he had to find Prosper the negro and drag him back to be slaughtered by the mob. But of what was he afraid? He did not know. The Major went on. He got out of the thicket. There, sure enough, dimly outlined in the starlight, lay a hut. He went down towards it. It was a mere ruin. Those who had lived there had either die
d or gone away. It was empty.

  He went in. He shouted: “Anybody here?”—and was surprised to hear the husky rasp of his voice. His throat was dry. He felt ill and weak . . . and still frightened. His mind revolted against the trembling of his limbs. His body was scared, and wanted to hide. As he stood in the hut, shaking like a man in an ague, the first glimmer of day came through holes in his boots. “. . . I must have been walking in black mud . . .” Then he saw his hands. They were black and wrinkled, with whitish nails and pink palms—negro’s hands.

  Sick with anguish, the Major leapt up. There was a fragment of broken mirror. He looked at his reflection.

  The terrified face of Prosper the negro looked back at him.

  He does not know how long he stood there, staring. He, the Major, was in the body of Prosper, the black fugitive. Some strange flash of intuition told him that somehow . . . God knew how . . . while he lay in his exhausted trance, and while Prosper also lay in a coma of weariness and misery . . . somehow their souls in sleep had met and changed places. . . .

  He heard, in the remote distance, a baying of bloodhounds.

  The spirit of the Major turned to give battle. But the body of Prosper fainted with horror.

  And it must have been exactly at that moment that the body of the Major, gibbering in the voice of Prosper, came staggering through the trees towards the lynch-mob and begged for mercy, so that they took him home while the negro escaped.

  And then came the darkness of unconsciousness, out of which the Major struggled to find himself in his bed, surrounded by curious eyes and astonished faces.

  That is all. There is only one thing more. The Major went into the wood again, and followed the route he remembered. There was the thicket; and there, in a hollow, lay the hut.

  On the floor of the hut, smashed to pieces where it had been violently flung down, lay the remains of a bit of mirror.

  The Gentleman all in Black

  There is a crazy old fellow who lives—or used to live, in 1937—in a crazy old skylight room in Paris, and was known as Le Borgne. He squinted horribly, and was well known for his avarice. Although he was reputed to have a large sum of money put by, he shuffled about in the ragged remains of a respectable black suit and tried to earn a few coppers doing odd jobs in cafés. He was not above begging . . . a very unsightly, disreputable, ill-tempered old man. And this is the story he told me one evening when he was trying to get two francs out of me.

  “You needn’t look down on me,” he said. (He adopted a querulous, bullying tone, even when asking a favour.) “I have been as well-dressed as you. I’m eighty years old, too. Ah yes, I have seen life, I have. Why, I used to be clerk to one of the greatest financiers in the world, no less a man than Mahler. That was before your time. That was fifty years ago. Mahler handled millions. I used to receive the highest of the high, the greatest of the great, in his office. There was no staff but me. Mahler worked alone, with me to write the letters. All his business was finished by three in the afternoon. He was a big man, and I was his right hand. I have met Royalty in the office of Mahler. Why, once, yes, I even met the Devil.”

  And when I laughed at him, Le Borgne went on, with great vehemence:

  Mahler died rich. And yet it is I who can tell you that, a week before his death, things went wrong and Mahler was nearly twenty million francs in debt. In English money, a million pounds, let us say. I was in his confidence. He had lost everything, and, gambling in a mining speculation, had lost twenty million francs which were not his to lose. He said to me—it was on the 19th, or the 20th of April, 1887—“Well, Charles, it looks as if we are finished. I have nothing left except my immortal soul; and I’d sell that if I could get the worth of it.” And then he went into his office.

  I was copying a letter to the bank, about five minutes later, when a tall thin gentleman dressed all in black came into my room, and asked to see Monsieur Mahler. He was a strange, foreign-looking gentleman, in a frock-coat of the latest cut, and a big black cravat which hid his shirt. All his clothes were brand new, and there was a fine black pearl in his tie. Even his gloves were black. Yet he did not look as if he were in mourning. There was a power about him. I could not tell him that Mahler could not be disturbed. I asked him what name, and he replied, with a sweet smile: “Say—a gentleman.” I had no time to announce him: I opened Mahler’s door, and this stranger walked straight in and shut the door behind him.

  I used to listen to what went on. I put my ear to the door and listened hard, for this man in black intrigued me. And so I heard a very extraordinary conversation. The man in black spoke in a fine deep voice with an educated accent, and he said:

  “Mahler. You are finished.”

  “Nonsense,” said Mahler.

  “Mahler, there is no use in your trying to deceive me. I can tell you positively that you are in debt to the tune of just over twenty million francs—to be exact, 20,002,907 francs. You have gambled, and have lost. Do you wish me to give you further details of your embezzlements?”

  Calm as ice, Mahler said: “No. Obviously, you are in the know. Well, what do you want?”

  “To help you.”

  At this, Mahler laughed and said: “The only thing that can help me is a draft on, say Rothschild’s, for at least twenty millions.”

  “I have more than that in cash,” said the gentleman in black and I heard something fall heavily on Mahler’s desk, and Mahler’s cry of surprise.

  “There are twenty-five millions there,” said the stranger.

  Mahler’s voice shook a little as he replied: “Well?”

  “Now let us talk. Monsieur Mahler, you are a man of the world, an educated man. Do you believe in the immortality of the soul?”

  “Why, no,” said Mahler.

  “Good. Well, I have a proposition to make to you.”

  “But who are you?” Mahler asked.

  “You’ll know that soon enough. I have a proposition. Let us say that I am a buyer of men’s time, men’s lives. In effect, I buy men’s souls. But let us not speak of souls. Let us talk in terms of Time, which we all understand. I will give you 20,000,000 francs for one year of your life—one year in which you must devote yourself utterly to me.”

  A pause: then Mahler said: “No.” (Ah, he was a cunning man of business, poor Mahler!) “No. That is too long. It’s too cheap at that price. I’ve made 50,000,000 in less than a year before now.”

  I heard another little thud. The stranger said: “All right, my friend. Fifty million francs.”

  “Not for a year,” said Mahler.

  The stranger laughed. “Then six months,” he said.

  And now I could tell, by the tone of his voice, that Mahler had taken control of the situation, for he could see that the strange man in black really wanted to buy his time. And Mahler had a hard, cold head, and was a genius at negotiation. Mahler said: “Not even one month.”

  Somehow, this affair brought sweat out on my forehead. It was too crazy. Mahler must have thought so, too. The stranger said:

  “Come. Do not let us quarrel about this. I buy time—any quantity of time, upon any terms. Time, my friend, is God’s one gift to man. Now tell me, how much of your time, all the time that is yours, will you sell to me for fifty millions?”

  And the cold, even voice of Mahler replied: “Monsieur. You buy a strange commodity. Time is money. But my time is worth more money than most. Consider. Once, when Salomon Gold Mines rose twenty points overnight, I made something like twenty million francs by saying one word, Soit, which took half a second. My time, at that rate, is worth forty million a second, and two thousand four hundred million francs a minute. Now think of it like that——”

  “Very well,” said the visitor, quite unmoved. “I’ll be even more generous. Fifty million a second. Will you sell me one second of your time?”

  “Done,” said Mahler.

  The gentleman in black said: “Put the money away. Have no fear; it is real. And now I have bought one second of your time.”
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br />   Silence for a little while. Then they both walked to the window, which was a first-floor one, and I heard the stranger say:

  “I have bought one second of your time for fifty million francs. Ah well. Look down at all those hurrying people, my friend. That busy street. I am very old, and have seen much of men. Why, Monsieur Mahler . . . once, many years ago, I offered a man all the kingdoms of the earth. He would not take them. Yet in the end he got them. And I stood with him on a peak, and said to him what I say to you now—Cast thyself down!”

  Silence. Then I seemed to come out of a sleep. The door of Mahler’s office was open. Nobody was there. I looked out of the open window. There was a crowd. Mahler was lying in the street, sixteen feet below, with a broken neck. I have heard that a body falls exactly sixteen feet in precisely one second. That gentleman all in black was gone. I never saw him go. They said I had been asleep and dreamt him, and that Mahler had fallen by accident. Yet in Mahler’s desk lay fifty million francs in bonds, which I had never seen there before. I am sure he never had them before. I believe, simply, that the gentleman in black was the Devil, and that he bought Mahler’s soul. Think I am crazy if you like. On my mother’s grave I swear that what I have told you is true. . . . And now can you give me fifty centimes? I want to buy a meal . . .

  Strong Greek Wine

  “You——” said the innkeeper and then stopped. He had been about to say: “You have had a rough time of it.” The newcomer had the air of a man who has been badly beaten. His cheeks were mottled, so that they might have been bruised. Under each eye hung a black pouch, and his lips were swollen. Furthermore, the man had a wild, hunted look and his tired eyelids, struggling against the heavy hand of sleep, blinked rapidly as he glanced from side to side.