by Gerald Kersh
But Skylarks. This was a dog. For over a year and a half I lived on him, and I’ll swear to you by the soul of my father and my mother that I loved him like a brother. You may not believe it, but in those eighteen months he won thirty fights. Not a dog that stood against him lived to brag about it, except one—a lemon-coloured dog—whose master threw in the towel. Tearer by name, tearer by nature. He would run in, stop in, hold, kill, come out wagging his little tail and sleep. I used to take him to the pit in a pram with my kid. That dog that would have fought a leopard—ay, by God, and kill him or died—he would lie down next to the kid, holding his little hand between his teeth and never dreaming of hurting him. That is your fighting dog, your Staffordshire bull. A swine with anything on legs, but a lamb with a child.
Well . . . I ran into some trouble and worse than any in my life I wanted some money. Now Skylarks was a great dog, and everybody in the world knew him as such. I would have backed Skylarks with everything I ever possessed against any beast that ever had a leg in every corner of itself. But I couldn’t get a match; and there was a certain party called Joe Blue that wanted to buy Skylarks off me for twenty pounds. I dare say you know one can get to like a dog. I wouldn’t sell. And then the brokers came in and I went to Joe Blue and said I’d sell; but he wouldn’t buy. He offered me ten; and I spat on it.
He said: “Look. I’ll tell you what. How much have you got?”
“A fiver,” I said.
He said, lady . . . Gerald, he said: “Will you match him against two Alsatians?”
I said: “Yes.”
And so I took Skylarks along to meet Blue’s Alsatians. You know that Alsatian. He runs in and slashes. Blue had a dog and a bitch. Skylarks killed the dog in a minute and a half, and the bitch had slashed him to ribbons and they were locked jaw to jaw. Skylarks had the sense of a man. You know, when two dogs are fighting, how you take them apart—the dog that has the hold, you push him forward and then pull him back. Skylarks manœuvred himself loose like a Christian and got a hold on a pinch of skin in the Alsatian’s throat, and shifted, and got a proper grip, and killed her. By God, my God, that dear little dog . . . he was a warrior and he was a gentleman and God send us all a heart like the heart there was in that dog! It was all over in five and three quarter minutes, and Skylarks was standing by me, and I was dabbing peroxide of hydrogen on his cuts. Because he was cut, that lovely dog—he was cut up like macaroni. I collected my stakes. Then Blue said:
“Do you want to make yourself, or lose yourself some money?”
“What way?” I said.
Blue said: “He holds.”
I said: “In life or death.”
Then Blue said something horrible. He said: “He was holding with his jaw nearly broke. Do you think he’d hold with a leg cut off?”
I said: “How do you mean?”
He said: “I’ll lay you thirty pounds to ten he’d drop his hold of an iron bar if I took off a paw with an axe.”
I thought. I was disgusted, because, as I said, I had a liking for that dog. But then again, the brokers were in: The lass was sick and a kid was coming. I said to Skylarks: “Skylarks, brother, brother dog, brother Skylarks, I like you and I don’t want to do it to you . . . but, Skylarks, I’ve got to do it. Skylarks,” I said, “I’d sooner cut off my own paw. But nobody will lay a bet on that because I’m a man, and you’re a dog. But, Skylarks, forgive me, I got to do it because t’ old lass wants t’ brass and there’s a kid coming. So make ready, and lay hold.”
He understood. They held up a bar and he laid hold like I told him. And then Blue took off his off fore-paw with an axe, and that dog, that red dog, that lovely gentleman, he still kept hold; and I collected my money, and I cried like a child.
I fought him again on three legs, and another red dog, a fine red dog, killed him. And on another bet—although it broke my heart to see him lying there—we opened him, and let God be my judge, three minutes after he was dead . . . in-out, in-out, in-out, his heart was still beating.
My lovely Skylarks, my beautiful little Staffordshire gentleman! I wish he had been my father or my son. A man has a duty, but I loved him, I tell you that I loved him better than the old lass and better than the kid that came. I’d change anything. I’d give anything for him back.
And when I broke away and I was lying there, dying . . . dying of hunger, hunger and cold and misery out in those plains, lying in a ditch . . .
. . . Do you know what it’s like to dream of hunger? When your belly is eating itself up because there is nothing else left for it to eat? You dream of waves, of a sort of fog in waves like a misty day; only it moves like a sea and carries you with it . . . and then when you wake up you’re sick, and cold, and you want to give up. I’m telling you something. I would have given up a dozen times in them months, lady. Yes, Gerald, I would have given up time and time again . . . only I kept on thinking about that Skylarks. That lovely red Staffordshire gentleman. And I ask you—could I be less than a dog? He was better than most things: but he was a dog, only a dog. And I’m a man. Could I be less? So I broke through in the end.
Gavin Eld made rings on the table with his glass. He was speaking in an undertone, now, like a man alone and talking to himself. Had the beer overtaken him?
He muttered:
“Thalt fight na more, my red beauty; thalt ne’er fly in agen at t’enemy’s throat with tha grand heart of iron banging lak a drum and a glow in tha black een lak cals. I’ll not feel tha bull’s neck in my hands, nay never agen, never. Eh, tha wicked swine, nobbut death’d separate t’enemy and thee, and tha shamed me back to life. Ay, tha didst, tha knows tha didst . . . and but for remembering thee I’d ’a gone back lak a coward. Thoroughbred to t’ bone as thart, could I let thee think tha master was nobbut a cur?”
Then he rose, not very steadily. “He was only a dog,” he said. “But I’m only a man.”
Reflection in a Brown Eye
A vivacious young literary man, recently discharged from the Army because he was “temperamentally unsuitable”, had been telling us a funny story about his Company Sergeant-Major who liked to play with plasticine. In the blacked-out privacy of his bare room, the Company Sergeant-Major modelled fantastic figures—gnomes, devils, faces, and impossible birds. At bedtime he would heave a big sigh, beat the things he had shaped into a neat flat oblong, and lock the modelling-clay in a little-drawer. The story was well told, and there was a burst of laughter; but between two ha-ha’s I became aware of a little zone of cold silence. Looking sideways, I saw a Lieutenant of Commandos pursing his lips in an expression of intense distaste.
He, I could see, was an old regular soldier: every muscle in his body betrayed the fact. The arteries in his neck were big with shouting; the tendons of his throat were stiff with old, swallowed anger. He reminded me of Quarter-Master Sergeant Spontoon. Spontoon, who had a hand like an over-baked loaf and ears like scrambled eggs, made silly little pictures of ladies in crinolines by sticking coloured tinfoil on bits of glass: he framed them and gave them away to his friends. And he was reminiscent of the man we used to call Corporal Punishment, who wrote poetry like this:
The heat is awful as on parade I moil and toil.
My perspiration pours from me like boiling oil.
Oh, if I only could feel just now
Your lovely ice-cold lips upon my fevered brow . . .
The Lieutenant, I guessed, had—like the literary man’s Sergeant-Major—his private creative impulses. Men under discipline, who sit out the leisure-hours of their youth in barracks, need some way of using up the chopped-off odds-and-ends of yearning that litter the lockers of their minds. One makes a little picture; another makes a little rhyme; a third tries to invent a little machine; a fourth cuts off the tail of his shirt and patiently shapes a collar, or hacks a regimental badge out of a bit of brass. They want to make something durable, these good, quiet fighting-men. For example, Mr. Cosstoe, with a box of coloured chalks and a sheet of brown wrapping-paper, wanted to make an i
mmortal masterpiece. Poor old man!
He was eighty-seven years old, and I was nine: he was in my way, when I met him first. I wondered what right he had to litter the lawn with his bent body when Bill Baldwin and I wanted to play soldiers.
“That’s my great-grandpa,” said Bill Baldwin. “He’s my mother’s grandfather.”
It had never occurred to me that mothers could have grandfathers. I glanced enviously at Bill Baldwin, and then gazed at Mr. Cosstoe who sat sunning himself twenty feet away, making marks on a piece of paper while a very old spaniel sat at his feet, panting in the sunlight and looking up into his face. In spite of his years, and the white whiskers on his cheeks, there was a youthfulness about old Mr. Cosstoe; an indefinable something, like the optimism at which middle-aged men smile, saying: “Ah, boyhood!”
I remember that I was impressed by the pearly cleanliness of his hair and the clearness of his eyes, which were pale blue. His dog’s name was Jack, and Jack, also, was almost too old to be alive—fifteen years old, unsteady, asthmatic, sore-mouthed, too heavy for his legs, malodorous. He would not leave the old man, but sat at his feet in the sunlight, wheezing, while Bill Baldwin and I played on the lawn.
“He was in the Crimean War,” said Baldwin. Then he added, in a nasty voice that was not his own: “He’s a nuisance to himself.”
An intuition informed me that Bill Baldwin had heard his mother say this. She was a little, boneless, white-blonde woman who—soft and sour as she was—made me think of fungus in a vinegar bottle. Her husband was in the Civil Service. Her father had been a school-teacher: he was dead. But Mr. Cosstoe went on living—battered, disreputable, carrying with him the tobacco-laden atmosphere of the barracks. It was irreligious: the old man was eighty-seven. A man’s allotted span was threescore-years-and-ten; pension or no pension, he was seventeen years overdue.
I did not like Bill Baldwin’s mother, but I found myself overcome by something like affection for his great-grandfather. One day I asked him what he was doing with his chalks and his brown paper.
Mr. Cosstoe said:
“Why, I’m drawing Jack’s eyes, don’t you see?” He showed me something like a smear of chocolate, full of high-lights, and shaped like a wheel.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Do ye though?”
I hesitated. Mr. Cosstoe shook his head and said: “No, ye don’t. No use talking, son, ye don’t.” He crumpled the paper in his big, knuckly, shiny red hands, and threw it down.
I asked: “Why the dog’s eyes?”
He said: “Ah . . . . D’ye know what dog that is, son?”
“A spaniel, sir?”
“A Cocker Spaniel: you’re not far wrong. For forty years, now, I’ve been trying to draw that dog’s eyes.”
I could not understand the meaning of forty years, and so I shook my head.
“Thisyer dog is Jack,” said Mr. Cosstoe. “The one before him was John. Before John there was Jim, and before Jim there was Joe. They’re all related, d’ye see. Now, you look at Jack’s eyes, sonny—look straight at ’em, and tell me straight what you see.”
The old, gasping dog still looked up. I put my nose close to his and looked into his eyes. There was nothing to see but a reflection of my own face, distorted as in a pair of convex mirrors.
“I see me,” I said, “like in a spoon.”
Mr. Cosstoe nodded. “Quite right,” he said, “quite right too. That’s what I’m after.”
“I beg pardon, sir?”
“Me,” he said. “I always liked to draw a bit. I was at Inkerman when we went for the Rooshians with stones in our bare fists: I was in the Army thirty-six years. Right, we’ll hedge that. You’ll find out, sonny, you’ll learn. Dear little boy! God bless you and love you . . . I was telling you . . . what was I telling you?”
“About the dog’s eyes, sir.”
“Ah, we’re both getting on, Jack,” said Mr. Cosstoe, caressing the spaniel’s ears, “good old dog, good old boy! You got no sense, then, have you, Jack? Oh dear, oh dear, poor old Jack!” He toyed with his chalks. “You see yourself, God bless you, in that dog’s eyes,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Me too. Before you was born, before your father was born, I see myself in a spaniel’s eyes; and that’s what I’m after, and that’s what I’ll get, too! . . . There, there, Jack old boy; poor old boy! . . . One day I come home, and—never mind what, sonny, God spare you! I finds myself all alone with the dog . . .”
He paused, shaking his head, and then went on: “It struck me that my dog, Joe, hadn’t guarded the house properly, don’t ye see? Somebody—I mean to say, something—was missing. And there was nothing but the dog. I go to hit the dog. Then I see myself in his eyes, d’ye see? And I go cold. Oh dear me, dear me!—I see myself as the dog sees me, in a brown looking-glass with all my face pushed forward and a fist raised up to strike; while the dog sits, wondering what he done to me; and him with a paw bent. . . . My goodness me! I see myself in the dog’s eyes, and I think: ‘Let me draw this eye, and me in it—the dog’s eye full of love, and me full of rage! Let me draw this, and if I can make others see it the same way as I see it, why . . .’ Well, what I’m after is me in that dog’s eye, little boy. But I can’t hit it, I can’t hit it.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “I mean, no, sir.”
He patted my hand. “You see what I mean?” he asked.
“I don’t think so, sir.”
“Good for you,” said Mr. Cosstoe. “Tell the truth and shame the devil!”
Then Bill Baldwin came out of the house, into which it had been necessary for him to withdraw for a few minutes. The old man picked up a stick of chalk, started to smooth a fresh sheet of brown paper, then threw the chalk away. It broke on the sunbaked lawn. He pushed the paper aside and let himself relax in his arm-chair. “Oh dear, dear, dear, dear me!” I heard him say. “Dear me, dear me!”
I was taken away to the seaside next day. When I came back a month later, Bill Baldwin told me that his great-grandfather was dead and buried.
“About time, too,” he said, in his mother’s voice. “He was a nuisance to himself.”
“What about the dog?” I asked.
“Mother had him put to sleep,” he answered. “He was too old.”
Maria’s Christ
To this very day the old woman called Maria believes that while she slept, angels—or, at least, kindly spirits—moved invisible by her side and carried for her the burden which her aged hands were too tired to lift.
By the greatest good fortune she lives, now, in Switzerland. She is more than seventy years old, but strong and vigorous still. How shall I describe her? Her face is brown and dry, like earth. And like sun-baked earth, it is reticulated with tiny intersecting cracks. There is something of the quality of good earth about old Maria: the sun may dry her, the rain may flood her, and the wind may blow her from place to place . . . and yet she always survives, in one place or another. Anxiety and the years have corrugated her forehead and plucked out her eyebrows. What remains of her hair is white. In the middle of it there is a parting—or rather, a path—more than an inch wide. The rest is drawn back and fastened in a knot no bigger than a walnut at the nape of her neck. Since time immemorial she has worn nothing but severe black, and nobody in living memory has seen her without beads and crucifix. Nothing on this earth—nor in the heavens above, nor in the waters under the earth—can shake her faith in a personal, benevolent Providence.
She came off a wine farm where they lived on bread: bread boiled, bread fried and just bread. At the age of twelve she became a servant, and for about fifty-five years remained, profoundly devoted to a good family in Barcelona. She was one of those servants who become involved in the life of the family. With her own knotted hands she brought up the little boy, whom she called Juanito. She called him Juanito still, when he was a harassed man of forty-five, somewhat involved in the Spanish equivalent of the Liberal Party. When Franco came, through blood, to what passes as power,
Juanito, who was the last survivor of the family, saved himself and went to France. He assumed, perhaps rightly, that nobody would bother to touch old Maria. But he did not count upon the fanatical loyalty of the old woman; who would look after Juanito! Besides, if he were in France, quite obviously, her place was in France too. The Fascists were approaching Barcelona. She wrapped her most treasured possessions in an old shawl, and set out for the border.
It is not quite clear what Maria valued most among the few things she had managed to accumulate in her long, hard life. One thing is certain: there was a heavy ebony crucifix with a white ivory Christ; some kind of silver-gilt drinking cup, and a few clothes—particularly two hats of a more or less ornate nature, which she had never worn, preferring, quite rightly, the graceful and time-honoured shawl. The bundle contained, also, two books which she could not read, and three ornaments for the mantelpiece such as one wins at hoopla in a fun-fair. Heaven only knows what people preserve as treasures, and why! The whole bundle must have weighed about fifteen pounds, and there was hardly an object in it which anybody would have bothered to pick up if he had seen it lying in the street. But she tied it very firmly together and set out from Barcelona over the long, bitter, dusty road away from something she recognised as a menace but could not understand.
Her old feet rose and fell with a mechanical regularity. She reached Gerona. She had, of course, food and water with her; she, of all people, would not have forgotten that. But perhaps it was the shock of her uprooting from the place in which she had lived so long. Such a shock may weaken a person like the shock of a wound. At Gerona she felt herself growing strangely weak, and sat, always clasping her bundle, by the roadside. A family, also in flight, passed in a large car; then stopped, and offered her a lift. They were going, they said, to Figueras, where one of their relations was to join them; as far as that they could take her. She thanked them, climbed in, and drove on.