by Gerald Kersh
The station-master who was passing said: “Missed your train, I see, Mr. Scripture.”
“Yes.”
“Never mind, sir, there’s another one due at 8.20, and that’ll get you in around 9.20.”
“God!” said Mr. Scripture; and suddenly felt sick.
The station-master went on: “Nasty morning. Sort of weather that gets you down. I can feel it, I don’t mind telling you, with my rheumatism. When I got up this morning, I fair hollered out with pain.”
Then he went away, and Mr. Scripture thought: 9.20! Oh, Lord, this is the end of everything. . . .
He was quite sure of this. It was true that, in the eleven years during which he had worked for Sir John Hardesty, he had never once been late. But in Hardesty’s offices, no one ever was late. Unpunctuality was a crime, a black crime which Hardesty could never forgive.
“Time is money,” he said; and believed it. So many minutes, so many shillings; if you were late, you were robbing him; you were a thief. You felt fortunate only to have been sacked; you were grateful that he had not called the police. Hardesty was a cold man, cold as ice. And a brute. Little Mr. Yorke had worked for him for fifteen years, only to be ordered out of the office like a dog, on account of a miserable fifteen-minute lapse.
With Hardesty, you knew what to expect. He was the big, bad business-man of fiction. By incredible toil and superhuman toughness, he had made his way out of the back-alleys of a Liverpool slum.
He was hard and mean. You felt that he begrudged even the words he spoke to you: he flung them into your face in stony monosyllables, which he snapped off with implacable, slitted, steely lips. He was inhuman; a believer in the maxim: No friendship in business. Friendship? With Sir John Hardesty there was nothing but enmity.
Everybody hated the man. God help the wretch who owed anything to Hardesty! Sooner ask for three days of grace from the Angel of Death than ask Hardesty for a little more time to pay. And woe to the man who came to Hardesty for charity! There was more kindness in the paving-stones; more gentleness in the winter rain. Starvation was easier to bear than his brutal contempt. In a way, he was just; but even his justice was bitter, mathematical, and lifeless. . . .
And this is what I must face this morning! thought Mr. Scripture, with a qualm of terror. And there came into his soul a desire for flight. Dismissal was inevitable. Then why face the ordeal of it?
Blown by the wind, a crumpled piece of tin-foil from a cigarette packet slid along the platform and touched his foot. He started, and looked at his watch; stared, with dumb fright. Time had stopped!
No, only his watch had stopped. The station clock said 8.10. Then why was his heart beating so fast? He adjusted his waistcoat, stamped his feet to warm them; and remembered, with peculiar vividness, the nightmare of the thing that clung to his feet . . . the unseen thing that had dragged him down and down. . . .
Pure fear took hold of him, on that long, windswept platform. He lit a cigarette, though he never smoked before midday; inhaled smoke, and felt better. He wanted a cup of tea, a very strong cup of tea . . . he wanted a cup of tea more than he had ever wanted anything in his life. Approaching the ticket-collector, he said:
“What wouldn’t I give for a cup of tea!”
The man replied: “Ah! Or cocoa with milk.”
Then the train came. Mr. Scripture chose the compartment which, he calculated, would stop nearest to the exit at Liverpool Street. From there, with luck, he could run to the office in five minutes. Hardesty always arrived at 9.15. There was a chance—a feeble ghost of a chance—that on this unholy morning, the great man himself might be a few minutes late.
It would be a miracle, but miracles sometimes did happen. Poor men won £30,000 in sweepstakes, or football pools; coincidences occurred, mad coincidences. . . .
Somebody had left a newspaper on the other seat, a vulgar picture paper, such as Mr. Scripture scorned to read. He saw the black headline: FAMILY DROWNED AS YACHT CAPSIZES, but had not the heart to read. The train rumbled on. He felt that he had been riding in that train since the beginning of time.
Exhausted, he dozed; felt a horrifying sensation of dizzy flight; opened his eyes again . . . closed them; and with shocking inevitability there recurred the dream of the clinging thing, and the downward sinking. He cried out, and awoke. A voice cried: “Liverpool Street!” and Mr. Scripture ran out, still half asleep.
It was only when he reached the street that he remembered his hat, which he had left in the train. But he did not pause. He ran until he reached the office, and crept into his own little room. The unopened mail lay on his desk. He glanced at it. The uppermost letter was from Thompson’s—nobody could fail to recognise the long, pretentious blue envelope.
Now . . . thought Mr. Scripture; and his mouth became dry. He smoothed down his hair, and knocked at the door marked Sir J. Hardesty. Private. There was no answer. Crazy hope sent his heart into his throat. He’s not here! Not here! Then he opened the door, and hope died.
Hardesty was sitting there, waiting for him; grimmer than death; with eyes like agate marbles, and a face like a granite death-mask.
“Come in, Mr. Scripture,” said Hardesty.
Scripture closed the door, stood before his master in a humble attitude, and said:
“I . . .”
“I know. You’re late.”
“Sir . . . Sir John, I . . .”
It was at this moment that Mr. Scripture, looking down, saw the earwig.
It was crawling across Hardesty’s formidable glass-topped desk, towards the blotting-pad. Mr. Scripture stared at it, fascinated. An earwig! On Hardesty’s desk!
It approached Sir John’s hand—that heavy, uncompromising hand. In another few seconds, it would touch him. . . .
“You know my rules, Scripture,” said Sir John.
“I . . . I . . .” Scripture forgot what he had been about to say. The explosion of a bomb could not have dragged his attention away from the earwig. The earwig! The earwig! How close to death that earwig was!
“You’ll tell me that you’ve never been late in eleven years. I know. You’ll say it’ll never happen again. It won’t. I pay you five hundred a year. I expect my rules to be obeyed . . .”
Scripture was dumb. He was still watching the earwig. It crawled to within an inch of Hardesty’s hand; then turned and crossed the desk again. . . .
“So take a month’s notice, Scripture. No, on second thoughts, draw a month’s salary, and get out. You’re sacked. Good day.” The earwig reached the edge of the desk; hung there for a moment, then fell on to the carpet; wriggled; disappeared.
As when the unseen thing had clung to his feet, Mr. Scripture shouted, within himself: I’m dreaming! This can’t be true!
And that, indeed, was the end of the dream; for he awoke with a loud cry, and found himself in his bedroom, almost weeping with relief.
Yes, he was awake, really awake; unmistakably wide awake.
He sat up, looking towards the window. It was a dreary morning. Then he looked at the clock, and his heart stopped beating.
It was a quarter to eight.
He had seven minutes.
He was stunned. Life had overlapped with nightmare. For a second he sat, looking about him; then leapt up and into the bathroom; shaved with lunatic haste, and dressed.
Snatching a hasty glimpse of himself, he felt in his chest a sensation as of something contracting. He had cut the left-hand corner of his mouth; and his waistcoat was buttoned awry. Steady! he told himself, you’re letting yourself be influenced by a dream! He tied his bootlaces with extraordinary care.
One of them broke.
Then he was out of the house, running desperately; desperately and hopelessly, like a man running away from his destiny. I will not look at the newsagent’s shop, he decided. Indeed, he had almost passed the corner, when an impulse too strong to be denied, made him turn his head. . . .
FRANCE TO ACT (Special)
shrieked the placard. It was after him! It w
as on his heels! The nightmare, the nightmare was upon him! The flapping of the wings of the pigeon shook him like the shock of gunfire. Why am I running? he wondered, I am finished. Why run? In another instant I shall hear——
Khsssh! shouted the train in the station; and Mr. Scripture still ran, under the bitter yellow sky; and arrived, as he knew he would, in time to see the train steam out.
He sat.
A voice said: “Missed your train, I see, Mr. Scripture.”
“Yes.”
“Never mind, sir, there’s another one due at 8.20, and that’ll get you in around 9.20. . . . Nasty morning. Sort of weather that gets you down. I can feel it, I don’t mind telling you, with my rheumatism. When I got up this morning, I fair hollered out with pain.”
I am caught, thought Mr. Scripture; and bowed his head.
Was this also a dream, a dream of a dream? He sat. He waited. He felt like a character in one of those old, macabre German films . . . a clock ticks; a shadow approaches; you know what is about to happen, and it happens—and because you expect it, it is all the more shocking.
The tinfoil slid up to his boot, with a tiny metallic rustle. Yes! Time . . . no, the watch had stopped. . . .
Tea. . . . “Ah! Or cocoa with milk.” The train! The compartment. There will be a newspaper. Yes, there is a newspaper. . . .
I must not forget my hat. I shall not be able to afford another.
“And I mustn’t go to sleep,” said Mr. Scripture, aloud. He was afraid of the nightmare of the clinging thing . . . the horrible sinking. . . .
But he slept; and he dreamt; and he awoke with a cry as the train reached Liverpool Street . . . ran in panic, half asleep, and, when he reached the street, groaned when he remembered his hat.
Yes. There was the mail. There was the blue Thompson envelope. There was the door. There would be no answer to his knock. There was no answer. No, there was no hope. There sat Sir John Hardesty, grimmer than death, saying:
“Come in, Mr. Scripture.”
“I . . .”
“I know. You’re late.”
“Sir . . . Sir John, I . . .”
Inevitable, also, as a figure in a familiar horror-tale, there crawled the earwig. Across the desk it crawled . . . towards the blotting-pad . . . up to Sir John’s left hand. Mr. Scripture was hypnotised. He could not move. He could not speak.
“You know my rules, Scripture?”
The earwig held him, even as it had held him in the dream. He struggled to tear his eyes away; writhed, and forced himself to look up and meet Hardesty’s gaze.
Then he was able to speak. He heard his own voice saying:
“You will say to me: ‘You’ll tell me that you’ve never been late in eleven years. I know. You’ll say it’ll never happen again. It won’t. I pay you five hundred a year. I expect my rules to be obeyed. So take a month’s notice, Scripture. No, on second thoughts, draw a month’s salary and get out. You’re sacked. Good day.’ ”
He saw Sir John’s expression change. The knotty forehead wrinkled in astonishment. Then Mr. Scripture looked down again, in time to see the earwig reach the edge of the desk, pause, and fall.
As it wriggled, he put out his foot and crushed it.
Sir John Hardesty said: “How the devil . . .” then paused. “What makes you think . . .” He bit the end off a cigar, cleared his throat, and shouted:
“Who are you to put words into my mouth? Get back to work, and don’t let it occur again!”
Once again Mr. Scripture told himself: I’m dreaming! This can’t be true! But it was true; and he leapt zealously to the door as Hardesty snapped:
“Quick. The Thompson correspondence, Scripture. Wake up!”
Who Wants a Liver-Coloured Cat?
There is a café near Cambridge Circus which is open all night, and into which strange men creep in the small hours of the morning. Let us call the café Rocco’s Coffee Bar.
If you wait long enough in Rocco’s you will see about forty per cent of all that is queerest in London.
There, between chocolate-coloured walls, under the fly-blown alabaster lamps that hang from the smoky ceiling, mysterious men sit, making small cups of coffee last, sip by sip, for hours after midnight.
I used to frequent Rocco’s. It was there that I met the man with the liver-coloured cat.
He was an exhausted-looking man, dark and pale, with a blue jaw. There was something wrong with one of his legs, he dragged it after him like a dead weight. He had none of the air of the habitual night-bird. Yet he was always in Rocco’s Coffee Bar, night after night, doing nothing, saying nothing; simply sitting, killing time . . . or rather, staying still while time killed itself.
He spoke to me for the first time late one night in November, 1938.
He said: “Like cats?”
“I don’t mind them,” I replied.
“Ah,” he muttered, sipping his coffee. “I do.” Then he said something strange. “Ever seen a liver-coloured cat?”
“Liver-coloured?”
“Sort of liver-coloured. Dark gingerish colour, but with a kind of purplish look about it. Liver-coloured. A tom-cat, very well grown.”
“I’ve never seen a cat like that,” I said.
“I have,” the strange man said, and shivered. “I’ve got one. I don’t like it.”
“Can’t you get rid of it?” I asked.
He laughed. You can tell just how tired a man really is when you hear him laugh. This man was weary to death, used up.
“You might think I’m crazy,” he said. “Perhaps I am crazy, but I don’t think so. Now, listen. What would you make of this? I swear to you—as God is my judge—that this is just what happened.
“Last month, I got home from work at about 6.30, and saw this cat sitting on the rug in front of the fire. There was a saucer of milk in front of it. It hadn’t touched the milk. The poor beast looked wet and bedraggled.
“I said to my wife: ‘Since when have we had a cat?’ ‘Since this afternoon,’ she said. ‘When I came back from shopping it was sitting on the rug. I don’t know how on earth it got in, but I didn’t have the heart to turn it out. Perhaps it’s ill. It won’t eat or drink.’
“I said: ‘Oh, well, let it stay, anyway.’ I had a meal and then drew my chair up to the fire. I couldn’t get comfortable.
“It was that cat. It was a nasty colour . . . sort of liver-coloured . . . and there was something queer about it. It didn’t wash itself, or close its eyes as other cats do in front of a fire. It kept staring.
“I went to bed early. Before I went to bed I opened the front door and bent down to pick the cat up. I was going to put it out. But I didn’t touch it—it snarled at me like a leopard, and ran out of its own accord.
“I saw it on the stairs. Then I shut the door quickly and went to bed. My wife asked me: ‘Did you put that cat out?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, and she sighed with relief and said: ‘Thank goodness.’
“Next morning I was up at seven. I went into the kitchen. I had to pass through the living-room. I nearly jumped out of my skin. There, sitting on the rug, was the cat.
“I swear I saw it run downstairs. Yet there it was. I had a very unpleasant feeling when I saw it there. But I was prepared to admit that it might—just possibly—have slipped back past me.
“I brought my wife a cup of tea. She said: ‘What’s the matter?’
“ ‘Matter?’ I said.
“ ‘Yes, you look pale.’
“I said: ‘Oh, nothing. Bit of a turn. I’d swear I put that cat out last night. But it’s still here. But I’ll tell you what. You don’t like that cat. No more do I. I’ll ring the cats’ home and have it taken away.’
“ ‘For heaven’s sake, do that now,’ she said.
“So I went out as soon as I was dressed and telephoned. Then I went to work.
“That evening my wife told me that the man had come and taken the cat away in a basket. We both felt better, because there was something about that cat that somehow scared us.<
br />
“We turned in early. In the middle of the night I woke up suddenly. I had a . . . not exactly a dream, but something like a thought . . . an unpleasant feeling.
“I sat up, wide awake. I listened. Nothing. I got out of bed and went into the living-room. The doors were shut. The windows were shut.
“But down on the rug there were two green things. Eyes. It was the cat.
“Yes. The same cat; there aren’t two cats of that colour. I’m no hero, but I hope not more of a coward than most men. But I was scared—and angry.
“You may know that I’m on the road for P—— and Co., and use a car. That same morning I borrowed a sack. I caught the cat and got it into the sack, and tied up the mouth of the sack with more string than was necessary, really. Then I dumped both cat and sack into the car—it struggled like the devil—and drove, hell-for-leather, out as far as Thornton Heath.
“I dropped the cat, still in the sack, on the steps of a house, and drove back. It was a Saturday. I didn’t go out to work on Saturdays. When I got back my wife was in a flutter.
“ ‘Where have you been?’ she asked.
“ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘that’s disposed of that confounded liver-coloured cat, anyway.’ And I told her what had happened.
“She said: ‘You’ve been dreaming.’ And she pointed. On the mat in front of the fireplace . . . yes. The cat!
“Can you explain that? I looked at my wife. She looked at me. ‘Don’t think I’m mad. I’m not—only fed up,’ I said. ‘But I give you my word of honour that I dumped that cat ten miles away half an hour ago.’
“She said: ‘I don’t think you’re mad. There’s something uncanny about this . . . cat. I’m afraid of it. It’s not natural. It doesn’t eat or sleep. And it keeps staring. And—John—I know the man from the cats’ home took that cat away. I saw him take it. And then . . . I came out of the bedroom, and there it was, sitting, just looking at me. John—what is it?’
“I said: ‘I don’t know. But, my dear little girl, all the cats on earth aren’t worth your little finger . . . and so you and I are going to take this cat to a vet., and we’re going to have it put to sleep once and for all.’