Neither Man Nor Dog

by Gerald Kersh

  “Well?” he said. “What?” There was a hoarse savagery in his voice which the innkeeper did not like. He replied:

  “I was going to say, you are welcome.”

  There was a faint melodious noise. The innkeeper looked away from the stranger’s face, and smiled. The man was flipping a large silver coin in the air and catching it as it fell. In the gloom of the tavern you could have seen the flash of the innkeeper’s eyes as they followed the flight of the piece of money.

  “Wine?” he said.

  “Strong wine.”

  The innkeeper bowed, and lifted a small wine-skin.

  “I have something special here,” he said. “Extra. Did you say strong wine? This would knock an ox down or resurrect the dead. This is imported stuff. Greek wine.”

  “Have one yourself,” said the stranger. He looked about him. There was only one other customer—a silent, elderly man with a broken nose. “You too.”

  “I don’t mind if I do,” said the landlord.

  “You’re very kind,” said the other man.

  The stranger nodded and drank. “Greek wine, you liar!” he said.

  “My lord,” said the innkeeper. “You seem to have some doubts as to the quality of this wine. Let me assure you——”

  “Well? Well?”

  “Your Honour! Your hand!”

  “What about my hand?”

  “You have bitten it!”

  The stranger blinked at his left fist. From a ring of blue marks, reluctant drops of blood slowly oozed. He said: “What’s that?”

  “Nothing, your Highness. Only for a moment you startled me, biting your hand like that.”

  “For God’s sake shut up and get some more wine!”

  Two more men came in—one fat, the other thin. They saw the stranger and there was something about him that stopped the casual trickle of their conversation. The fat one glanced at the innkeeper, who winked and nodded. “Your Honour, shall I give these gentlemen a drink too?”

  “Eh?”

  “I said——”

  “Drinks!” cried the stranger, in an awful, rattling shout, and smashed his cup to tiny fragments with one blow of his fist.

  “Ah . . . there will be a trifle to pay on that,” said the innkeeper.

  The stranger stopped spinning the coin and hurled it across the counter. Bowing to the ground, the innkeeper murmured: “May you live a thousand years, my lord.”

  Silence came again. “Your health, honoured sir,” said the fat man. “Have you come far?”

  “Yes,” said the stranger.

  “From . . . ?”

  “Well?”

  “I—I was going to say . . .”

  The stranger raised his eyes, and there was such utter desperation in that glance that the fat man gulped his drink and said no more. The thin man tried to make conversation. “Plenty of excitement in town these days,” he said. “Hear the latest? Riots. It seems there was——”

  “For God’s sake!” said the stranger, in a queer, high voice. “Is there no musician here? Does nobody play? Does nobody dance? Does nobody sing? Is there nothing in this stinking, dirty, filthy city that. . . . Are there no women? Then for the love of God bring some wine!”

  “Greek wine,” said the innkeeper.

  “You lie. But bring it.” The stranger produced another silver piece, which he flipped and spun with nervous intensity. “Curse you, hurry!” The innkeeper spilt dark puddles of pungent wine in his haste, and set out more cups.

  “Long life,” said the fat man.

  The stranger laughed and drank. The innkeeper whistled. The thin man coughed. Nobody liked the sound of that laughter. “Well?” said the stranger. “Isn’t anybody saying anything? Haven’t you got tongues? Are you struck deaf and dumb and paralysed? God damn you—talk!”

  “It’s a hot day,” said the innkeeper.

  “Coming over dark,” said the man with a broken nose.

  “Looks like a storm,” said the thin man.

  The fat man cleared his throat and said: “Yesterday I heard a good joke, but I seem to have forgotten it.”

  “More drinks,” said the stranger.

  “Steady on,” said the fat man. “I’ve got work to do. How’s business, Joseph?”

  The landlord replied: “How’s what? Business, did you say? What business? Don’t make me laugh. Business! I can’t pay my way any more. Taxes here, taxes there. . . . And then, again, I’m at the wrong end of town. It’s dead.”

  “It’s slack everywhere,” said the fat man. Addressing the stranger, he added: “Don’t you find it so?”

  “Don’t I find what so?”

  “Business bad.”

  “Yes.”

  Outside, the quiet street lay, salt white in the blinding daylight. A shadow fell over the threshold. Two women were coming in followed by some men. The innkeeper winked and made a gesture, upon which the women smiled and sat at the stranger’s table. He looked at them gloomily. One of the women was young and beautiful. The other was older, but fully painted. There were shadows under her eyes, and her ears supported heavy metal rings.

  “Drink for the ladies, your Excellency?” asked the innkeeper.

  “Yes,” said the stranger.

  A scarred old man in the armour of a soldier, caressing a chin that was hard and black with calluses from the chin strap of his helmet, said: “Your health, sir. Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?”

  “No,” said the stranger, looking away.

  “I’m sure I have! I must have! Let me think——”

  “Wine, for God’s sake!” said the stranger.

  The room was full now. “For everybody?”

  “Yes, fill ’em up.” The stranger looked at the coin he was spinning, and threw it across the room to the innkeeper, who caught it and pocketed it in one smooth gesture.

  “You ought to get some change,” said the man who looked like a wrestler.

  The innkeeper whispered: “Mind your own business, can’t you?”

  Somebody began to play a stringed instrument. The elder woman started to sing, some strange forlorn song of slaves; a lugubrious, tortured song in a minor key. Her thick, husky voice seemed to rise and fill the air like smoke.

  “Take me, O Master, to the hills

  That are to me as the breasts of my mother—

  Lead me to those gentle valleys,

  In the soft grass and the fresh wind

  Let me die . . .”

  “Drinks!” shouted the stranger. The innkeeper busied himself with the wine-skins. A negro with the body of a god and the humility of a beast carried cups and pots. Noise filled the tavern, drowning the woman’s voice. She stopped singing, looked at the stranger, touched his hand, and said: “In trouble, dear?”

  “No,” said the stranger, and pushed her away.

  “Would you like me to sing for you?”

  “No.”

  “Dance?”

  “No.”

  “Will you buy me a drink?”

  The stranger was staring out into the street. The morning shadows had crept close to the houses. It was noon. He pushed away his wine cup, which fell to the floor and seemed to explode in a star-shaped splash of glistening purple.

  “Did you go up the hill?” somebody asked.

  Somebody else replied: “What for? It’s all over by now. I’ve got something better to do.”

  The stranger pushed his way towards the door. There was a little white fleck in each corner of his mouth, which some unendurable misery had twisted into a narrow, lipless oblong.

  “Hey!” cried the innkeeper. “You owe me for one round.”

  The stranger stopped suddenly as if he had encountered an invisible wall. They saw him thrust a hand into his pouch, fumble, and withdraw a great clenched fist. He swung his hand. Everybody winced and ducked. There was a smash and a jangle of silver. People threw themselves on the falling money in a cursing heap.

  “Here,” said the stranger. “The other twenty-eight pieces.�
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  The innkeeper, standing in a strange attitude—for he had one foot on a coin and one fist clenched in the air where it had closed upon another—stared after him.

  The woman, hiding five pieces in her bosom, said: “He seemed to have something on his mind.”

  “All the same,” said the landlord, “I wish we had a customer like him every day.”

  The Old Burying Place . . .

  The old man said: “Once, when I was no older than you, I went as far away as the Old Burying Place.”

  “Where is that?” asked the little girl.

  “Far away, across the plains and through the forest. Ha, we were men, we were hunters. But, these young men? Bah. They have good bows and the best of everything, yet they have been away for a day and a night, and where is the meat? All I ask is a bit of meat to suck. I have lived through as many winters as there are fingers on eight men’s hands. In my day we had no iron-tipped arrows. We chipped a sharp flint, bound it firm, and—psst! Iron! Bah! Women they are: not men.”

  “Tell me about the Old Burying Place.”

  “It’s a long, long way away, but I went there when I was a boy. It was one winter, a terrible winter. There was no food. Even the acorns were rotten. All the pigs had gone away into the forests, so we followed them with our bows and our spears—my father, and his father, and myself.

  “It was very cold. We walked for five days before we found the tracks of a pig. We followed them all day, our arrows on our bowstrings. Towards nightfall we caught up with him—a very old one, rooting under the snow for food. My father’s arrow struck him in the flank. Then, when he ran away again, we followed. There was blood——”

  “Tell me about the Old Burying Place.”

  “Ssh! What am I telling you, then? I was saying: we followed the pig. I was tired, but dared not rest: they would have left me to die in the snow.

  “At last we came to a part of the forest full of broken stones. ‘We are coming to the Old Burying Place,’ said my father’s father. ‘There are bad things here. Let us go back.’ But my father said: ‘I fear only hunger,’ and drove us forward.

  “Soon there were no trees, only stones—the Old Burying Place. This is a place of death and darkness. Nothing grows there—not a weed; nothing. There we found the pig, lying dead. “We took out his liver and ate it before it got cold. Then we lay down to sleep, having lit a fire to keep away the cats. Only my father’s father would not sleep. He said: ‘It is not lucky to sleep here. People sometimes do not wake up after sleeping here. There are things walking here that should not be walking.’ At dawn I awoke and saw him, still sitting, watching.

  “Then my father said: ‘Let us open one of these burying places. I knew a man who found good cooking-pots in one of them.’ But his father said: ‘No. It is not good. There is bad air in these tombs. Why does nothing grow here, not even the grass?’ But my father was already striking with his axe at the door of one of the tombs, at a place where the earth had fallen away.

  “The door was of iron, but soft. It fell to a red dust. Then there was another door, and a deep pit. We took firesticks, and shouted to frighten away evil spirits, and climbed down, until we reached a great cave. Who could have dug such caves? They go deeper than man can follow, and are lined with smooth white stones, so that the sound of your voice comes back to you again and again, no matter how low you speak.

  “We walked for a great distance. The cave was very cold and dark, and our firesticks were burning low. At last we saw bones. They must have been the bones of common people. They had all been buried together; thrown in a pile at one of the doorways—more bones than you could count if you had ten times ten fingers and toes—bones and bones and bones. No cooking-pots; nor iron; nothing except their death-masks.”

  “Death-masks?” asked the little girl.

  “Yes. The buried People who lived here when the world was young used to cover the faces of their dead.”

  “Why?”

  “Who knows why? So; we turned back. The bones of three people lay in a corner; a man, a woman and a child, holding together still, even in death. Nearby there was a doll, such as you yourself might play with.”

  “You should have brought it for me.”

  “Fool! When you were not yet even born? My father said: ‘I shall not go away with empty hands.’ And he tore down a sheet of iron fixed to the wall. My father’s father took a death-mask.

  “As for me, I picked up a chain of yellow metal that hung on the dead woman’s arm. It must have been a powerful talisman, because even as I pulled at it the bones fell apart and tumbled to the ground in a heap like all the rest. Then we went back. The pig——”

  “And what was the chain like?”

  “Tah! A chain. On the end of it there hung a thing like this——” the old man crossed his forefingers—“with the image of a man hanging on it, fastened by the hands and feet.”

  “Oh, how pretty. And the mask?”

  “I don’t know. . . . It looked like the bones of a man’s head, but instead of eye-holes there were round plates of something you could see through; and instead of a nose there was a long tube and a bag. As for the iron plate, that is all I have left, and it hangs behind you now.”

  “Oh, is that it?” asked the little girl. She looked. The plate was long and rectangular; much cracked; eaten up by time. It had been enamelled. Still legible on its surface was one word:

  “PICCADILLY”

  The girl said: “I wish you had saved the chain.”

  The old man rose, laughing, as three young men came into the cave, dragging the corpse of a goat.

  A Small and Dirty Dog

  Yesterday I met a man who had fallen in love with a girl who was playing him up; and I remembered the story. . . .

  I used to know a man named Chico. Heaven only knows what has become of him. He was one of those men who are somehow destined to be made fools of by women.

  You know the type: drunk with vanity and full of trivialities; boiling over with a sense of stupendous importance—a bore who believed that the whole world waited breathlessly for news of his latest emotional entanglement.

  Now one day—it must be about seven years ago—I met him while I was sitting outside the Café des Deux Marronniers.

  I was having a drink with a queer little fellow who looked like a jockey and whose name I never knew, when Chico came fluttering about us with all the news of a brand-new infatuation.

  “She is wonderful, adorable, and good. She is faithful, devoted, and absolutely divine . . .”

  So he ran on. And then the man who looked like a jockey turned his head and deliberately spat on the pavement. His leathery little face wore an expression of seething distaste. Then he spoke, and this is what he said:

  I have lived about fifty years or so, more or less, and in the last thirty years I have never had anything to do with love as applied to women.

  I do not believe that women have any idea of the meaning of devotion. They are like men—too complicated and too tied-up in self-interest.

  No!—let me finish! I know what you’re going to say . . . that the love of a good woman is this, that, and the other! I do not deny that a good woman can love you as much as need be.

  After all, what the devil are human beings that they should expect other human beings to be taken in by them to the extent of loving them?

  I know all about people in love, because I was very much in love once, a long time ago.

  I was in the early twenties. I met a species of blonde who worked for a milliner, and although she was not much to look at (now that I come to think of it) and had a general air of treachery and vicious ill-temper, I took it into my head that she was the most delightful and divine female that ever walked on legs.

  So I started to go around with her and buy her presents, spending more than I could afford and making a perfect fool of myself.

  We used to quarrel horribly. I was jealous of her, and not without cause, for she was flighty . . . and worse.<
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  Then, one day, when I had seen her sitting in a café drinking, when she swore she had to visit a dying aunt, we had a last terrible row and parted.

  I was young and a fool. I took to drowning my sorrows in drink. But that, as you know, is no way to drown sorrows.

  This went on for weeks. I lost my job. I used up my savings. I went to the bad. I had a little bit of property, and began to sell that, too.

  I drank and drank. And then, one wretched rainy night on the edge of winter, I was staggering home to bed, eaten up with loneliness and the horrible depression of the drunkard, when, reaching my doorstep, I trod on something soft that whimpered.

  It was a dog. But what a dog! It was the canine equivalent of one of those outcasts of humanity whom you see picking among the dustbins.

  It was a mongrel, and a product of five hundred generations of mongrels. It looked like a jackal, it looked like a drowned lamb, it looked like the sweepings of a barber’s shop with its hair of twenty different colours.

  But the poor beast was very wretched, for it had been injured in a fight with a bigger dog—with a better dog—and was bleeding at the neck.

  Now you know the maudlin sentimentality of the drunk: normally I would have ignored the beast, or, if I had wanted to be merciful I would have had him killed.

  But now I picked it up and took it into my bedroom; bathed its wounds and bandaged them, and even reeled out to find something to eat for it.

  There is nothing that clings to life like your creature of the gutters: the dog recovered, and after that he would never leave me.

  You talk about love. I have yet to see a human love equal to the love of that dog.

  One night again, being savagely drunk, I beat him; but when he came afterwards to lick my hand—the hand that had injured him—an awful remorse took possession of me and, odd as it may seem, I gave up drinking.

  Yes, because of the influence of that small and dirty dog I found myself another job, saved myself from complete wreck and ruin, and began to settle down to the life of an industrious and respectable young bachelor.