Neither Man Nor Dog

by Gerald Kersh

  Karl spared no pains in Johann’s education. He taught him tricks of voice and facial expression; how to express abject humility with one twitch of the shoulders; how to make real tears run down the face. Johann was not deformed; only he looked strange. He had a little body and a large head, a mournful little mouth and huge brown eyes. Johann had the air of a youth in the grip of some devastating secret sorrow. This, Karl decided, was good. “People get tired of other people’s hunger. People get fed up with other people’s humps and amputations. But a mysterious, miserable look such as this brat Johann puts on—Himmelherrgottkreutzmillionendonnerwetter!” he exclaimed, employing Bismarck’s favourite oath, “they never get tired of that!”

  There was money in Johann’s big head, with its heavy brow and lambent eyes. He touched the learned societies, the religious benevolent funds—even a Fund for the Relief of Impecunious Men of Letters. Johann extracted two hundred marks in gold from this well-meaning charity, over the head of a fat old poor philosopher with a Life Work in seventeen volumes. Karl died, leaving two hundred thousand marks. When the Great War came, Johann found himself in Amsterdam. Business, there, was far from brisk. He ate, it is true, and talked a poor old woman into trusting him to pay rent on a basement. He was happy when the war ended, and he got himself deported, free of charge, over the German border, back to the old, familiar soil and the old, familiar speech.

  The countryside was impoverished. Johann crept to Berlin. The state of affairs in that great city was truly deplorable. There was scarcely any food to be bought, let alone to be given away. Johann Prysky was starving. He grew smaller, thinner, weaker: his eyes grew larger: he looked, more than ever, like a sorrowing philosopher. And at last, unable to endure the horrible pains in his stomach, and the profound lassitude of extreme hunger, he unrolled his secreted money-belt. He had two hundred and twenty thousand marks. Out of this hoard he extracted a one hundred-mark note, which he took to a baker’s shop.

  The shelves were almost empty when Johann, having waited for three hours in the queue, staggered into the shop. He said: “A one-pound loaf,” and, reluctantly fondling it, slowly letting it go as a woman relinquishes the hand of a beloved child who is leaving her for a remote corner of the world, dropped his hundred-mark note upon the counter.

  “What kind of a joke is this?” asked the baker.

  “A loaf . . .”

  “And where have you been that you don’t know the price of bread to-day?”

  “This is a hundred-mark note, sir.”

  “A one-pound loaf costs two hundred thousand marks.”

  “Eh?”

  “Get out of my shop.”

  The bread-queue took hold of Johann like a conveyor-belt. He found himself in the street. He looked at the hundred-mark note, and smoothed it.

  He walked until he found a bench, and then sat down. At last he rose, and walked back to the baker’s shop. “I will take the loaf,” he said, and took off his money-belt.

  “Bread’s up. One-pound loaf costs a million.”

  “I have two hundred and twenty thousand marks,” said Johann.

  “You could have a small roll for that,” said the baker.

  “I will take it,” said Johann.

  The Sailor’s Farewell to his Horse

  We had been talking about food as it is served in restaurants. One man said: “I’d sooner eat horse than pig when I come to consider their personal habits.” And then an old Merchant seaman said: “Eat horse? Why, I’d eat anything rather than a horse. Eating a horse is like eating a man—you just can’t do it, you mustn’t do such things.”

  There was profound distaste in his tone. The very idea horrified him. I looked at him with a certain curiosity. One does not expect a sailor to feel deeply about horses: they are not his business. But this little man was scowling at the very suggestion of horse-flesh as food for men. He was, I clearly remember, a short, burly man of about sixty, with tiny gold rings in his ears. These gold rings with his blue uniform and grizzled moustache gave him an air of outlandish recklessness: they made his face arresting. But when you looked away from them and considered the man without the ear-rings you saw an ordinary, chubby, round-faced person who could not have been anything but a plain Englishman. He went on:

  I was brought up on a farm. I’m a Bedfordshire man. My family have been farmers in Bedfordshire for five hundred years. My father married again. My mother died when I was born. My father was very keen on her and he couldn’t bear the sight of me after she died. He didn’t treat me badly, didn’t knock me about or starve me; just didn’t want me. He married again when I was about ten, a woman twenty years younger than himself. She didn’t like me either. She used to smack hell out of me. She was a little, quiet-looking, mousy, timid-seeming gel, but as soon as she was alone with me she used to make me pay for all the pushing-about she ever got, for she never dared answer my father back. All in all, I had a rotten time when I was a kid. There was nobody for me to play with. Kids ought to have somebody to play with or talk to. I got into the habit of talking to animals. And I kind of made friends with a young horse we had on the farm. His name was Lightning, not because he was fast, but because there was a sort of ziggy-zaggy white splash like a fork of lightning on his chest: the rest of him was black. I kind of fell in love with that horse, if I may say so without seeming silly. He was my pal. He understood every word I said to him. He was the only thing that saved me from going melancholy-mad. I’ve always been sorry for lonely children ever since. This was when I was about eleven. Lightning, then, was about two years old.

  Yes, I was turned eleven, when I made up my mind not to stand it any more. I ran away, to go to sea. I slipped away in the night. The only thing I said good-bye to was Lightning. I had taught him to shake hands: he’d raise a hoof and let me shake it. He did so then, and he knew that I was going away because he whinnied as if he was trying to speak. It nearly broke my heart. But I went, and the rest is a long and dead ordinary story. I got a ship, worked like a dog as you used to when there was sail, beat about the world, and saw lots of strange countries and got more kicks than shillings. It was a rough life. A cabin-boy was less than a dog: everybody might cuff his head or kick his backside. I hardened up, got older, passed the usual milestones . . . got drunk for the first time (it was in Hong Kong), learned to take care of meself in general, and banished home from my mind. I didn’t want to think about it. I’d been too miserable there. As a matter of fact I’ve never seen the place since: and never want to. When my father died and left me the place I sold it to a neighbour by post, and blew-in the proceeds in a couple of months.

  Well, I was saying, years passed and I was about twenty years old when I got a job on one of those posh little Channel boats. This, remember, was many years ago. I forget exactly when, but it was before nineteen-ten; good old days, but in some ways not so good. Those were the days of the horse-trade. The Belgians used to eat a lot of horse-flesh, and we used to ship old horses that had been worked out and were not fit to live any more. They would be sent to Belgium for meat. But what used to happen was this: when they landed these horses they would decide that there was another few months’ work to be got out of them, and so they would work them, the poor old horses, until they fell dead . . . and then eat them.

  It was my first trip on this boat. There was a cargo of old horses. When I saw them I felt sick inside. It’s not fair. Nobody has got a right to do it—to ill-treat a horse, which is the strongest and the decentest thing that God ever made. It’s wickedness! I couldn’t bear to look at these poor, broken-down, trembling old hacks that had worked so patiently all those years only to be sold off like this in the end. There is a special hole in Hell for people who get their money like that!

  We started. The horses had never been on the water before, and they were terrified. A storm—or rather, a bit of a wind blew up. The horses were plunging and kicking. I was told to see to them. I swallowed my gall and went. I tried to soothe them. They know when a man likes them and th
ey respond to it. And all of a sudden, looking at them, I saw one that seemed familiar. There was a lightning-shaped splash on his chest. Yes, it was old Lightning—but how he had changed! He had been a proud and beautiful animal, but now he was humble and wretched and broken. The tears came to my eyes when I looked at him. I said to him: “What, Lightning, Lightning my old pal, has it come to this?”

  He recognised my voice and looked up. He wasn’t quite certain. I said: “Why, Lightning, my old playmate, don’t you remember all the long talks we used to have, and the time when I told you the story of Jack the Giant Killer? You used to let me ride on your back. I used to read Dick Turpin to you. We’re both a bit past that now, aren’t we? What, Lightning,” I said, “won’t you shake hands with me?” He remembered, and lifted up one of his poor old shapeless hoofs, and I shook it, and he whinnied. The wind was rising. We were out of sight of land. I looked at him, and I cried like a child.

  Then I made my mind up. I said to him: “You was my pal. I never had any pal except you. And now they’re going to take you over there and make you work till you die and eat you, and turn your lovely old skin into leather, and the rest of you into filthy glue. But you’ve still got one pal left in this terrible old world, Lightning. Do you remember when I went away in the night, and you were sorry to see me go? Are you listening? Do you still understand me?” He whinnied. I got out my knife and cut him loose, and I said to him: “One good turn deserves another. Go on, good old Lightning, make a clean end of it.”

  He understood. He put up his hoof for me to shake. He put his muzzle on my shoulder for a second. I cut the other horses loose too. And old Lightning stood up stiff and straight, like a two-year-old again, and threw his head back and let out a neigh that sounded like a gale in the rigging, and he went galloping out, and the others followed him. They went stampeding across the deck. And then Lightning gathered himself, took a last jump, and went into the water. Just like men will follow a good leader, so the other horses tried to follow him, and three of them made it. I saw their heads bobbing for a second or two in the rough sea, and then they were gone. . . .

  And then I looked away, and my eyes were like windows when it is raining . . . and I saw a first-class passenger, a nasty old man of eighty who, I’d heard, had made a fortune renting slum houses. He was in a fur coat, and two men-servants were holding him up and walking him to and fro to keep away sea-sickness . . . I don’t know why I’ve remembered that.

  Then they collared me and I got hell. I paid dear, but I’d do it again. But what was I saying? Horse-flesh. Eat horse-flesh? I’d sooner eat my own brother if I had one.

  Envy

  Dorothy could see only the back of the fair young woman, but even about that back, she decided, there was something not quite respectable. The small white hat must have cost too much money; and in the colour of the hair beneath it was concentrated all the genius of Hanover Square. How many fittings had gone to form that dull green two-piece? How had she come by the sable tie? No, she carried herself with too much assurance: it was unnecessarily obvious that she had not a care in the world. Upon the third finger of her right hand shone an emerald as big as a farthing—an emerald such as no young woman can achieve by mere honesty. . . .

  At the same time, a little voice in Dorothy’s head said: Some women are lucky!

  It was at this moment that the fair woman turned her head, displaying a pale and perfect profile.

  “Charlotte!” cried Dorothy.

  “Good heavens, Dorothy!” said the blonde young woman, “this is a surprise! Fancy seeing you here! Come over to my table.”

  The same old Charlotte, thought Dorothy. She wouldn’t come over to me; no. I have to come to her. Still playing the great lady. . . . Nevertheless, she picked up her parcels, and went over to Charlotte’s table. There was a silence. Then Charlotte said:

  “Well . . . you’re a nice sister. Why don’t I ever hear from you?”

  “Oh . . . I don’t know. I . . .”

  “And what are you doing so far from home?”

  Dorothy indicated her parcels. “Just shopping.”

  “And how’s Harold?”

  “Oh, fine, thanks.”

  “Doing well?”

  “Oh, yes, wonderfully well. They’ve made him chief of a department. And you?”

  The emerald flashed as Charlotte played with a spoon. “Oh, I jog along, you know. I’ve just come back from America.”

  “Not really? What were you doing there?” asked Dorothy, with a qualm of envy.

  “Oh, I just went for a holiday. We made a tour—New York, California, all over the place.”

  “Did you go with friends?”

  “With . . . a friend.”

  There was another pause. She would go to America! thought Dorothy. She said: “And did you like it?”

  “Well, it wasn’t bad. Too much excitement, really; but the men are awfully courteous. But one got no sleep at all. Theatres, cabarets, clubs—there was so much to do. I slept nearly all the journey back. I was so exhausted. We came back on the Queen Mary. . . . But, my dear, the shops!”

  Instinctively, Dorothy looked at her parcels—the green carrier which contained two pairs of two-and-elevenpenny stockings; the small flat package which enclosed a pair of woollen pants; the other trivial purchases on which she had spent so much thoughtful calculation. She said:

  “Yes . . . I’ve heard there are some wonderful shops in America.”

  “Listen,” said Charlotte, “are you in a terrible hurry?”

  “Well, no, I’ve still got an hour or so before I get my train.”

  “Then come back to my hotel and I’ll show you some of my things.”

  Still showing off, thought Dorothy: but all the same, she said: “I’d love to.”

  Charlotte paid the bill from a roll of green notes. Dorothy caught a glimpse of a gold compact, a platinum cigarette-case, and a cheque-book.

  “Taxi!” cried Charlotte. The doorman shouted: “Taxi!” Charlotte gave him a two-shilling piece. In spite of her resentment, Dorothy could not help glowing in her sister’s glory as the taxi moved away.

  Charlotte occupied a suite in the Hôtel Pegasus, near Pall Mall—two silent, square rooms decorated in pale blue and gold. My miserable little brown and burnt-orange drawing-room, thought Dorothy.

  “Cocktail,” said Charlotte, “Sidecar? Manhattan? White Lady? Yes, White Lady——”

  That’s right—don’t give me a chance to choose; have it all your own way. . . .

  “—I’m good at White Ladies. Once, a man wanted to marry me, simply on account of my White Ladies.”

  Ice rattled in the shaker. Dorothy looked at her nails, and thought: Harold wanted to marry me for myself alone. . . . White Ladies! Showing off!

  “Well, cheers,” said Charlotte. The sisters drank. It seemed to Dorothy that Charlotte swilled her drink like a navvy; but in order not to appear provincial, she, also, emptied her glass in two swallows, and then went so far as to accept a fat Egyptian cigarette.

  Charlotte opened a vast wardrobe trunk, covered with a patchwork of gaudy labels—“Hôtel Bristol, Cairo”; “The Magnifique, Paris”; “The Mastodon, Berlin”—and began to pull out clothes.

  “I got this from Lulu—an exclusive model, my dear. And you see this night-dress? That was made, originally, for a queen; only I absolutely insisted—well, no, not exactly a queen, but a king’s mistress. That’s even better than a queen, eh? Ha, ha! Undies by Sikorsky . . . hats. Look, do you like this hat? I got it at Boadicea’s, in Hollywood. It was made for Joan Crawford. I bought it because I simply had to have it. And then, well, I simply couldn’t wear it. Isn’t that funny? Try it on.”

  “Oh . . . Oh! Isn’t it lovely?” cried Dorothy.

  “You can have it.”

  “Oh no, I wouldn’t dream——”

  “Don’t be stupid, Dorothy; I insist.”

  Just like Charlotte; just because she doesn’t want it, she offers it to me, so as to look big and gen
erous . . . and then she’ll go about saying I wear her cast-off hats. . . .

  “Well . . . it’s awfully sweet of you, but . . . well, it must have cost an awful lot of money.”

  “I didn’t pay for it.”

  “Harold would wonder where I got it.”

  “You know, Dorothy, you’re a fool. You let Harold arrange your life for you. You’ve thrown yourself away on a poor man, and now you simply sink yourself in all this domestic business. And what do you get out of it? Nothing. And yet you could have made so much of yourself. You always were the better-looking of us two, yet you seemed to have no ambition—no life in you. Honestly, Dorothy, I think you’re crazy. Soon, you’ll be having children——”

  “I’ve got one already.”

  “No! . . . Don’t tell me I’m an aunt!”

  “Yes, I assure you!”

  “Yet you seem to have kept your figure so well! A boy?”

  “No, a girl. Geraldine.”

  “How sweet. . . . But, Dorothy, is it worth it?”

  “Why not?”

  “Now I ask you, what can you do, tied up with children?”

  “Oh,” said Dorothy, trying to force a cheerful and contented ring into her voice, “there’s plenty to do.”

  “But what?”

  “Well, in the morning, there’s Harold’s breakfast to get, and then——”

  “Oh, I know, all this domesticity. How grim!”

  “There’s nothing grim about it,” said Dorothy, with rising annoy­ance. “I like it.”

  “But, Dorothy darling; how on earth do you amuse yourself?”

  “Well, I don’t have to amuse myself much. I find it all quite interesting. And I can go to the cinema. . . . Besides, Harold and I come up to Town quite often, and go to a show, and have dinner.”

  “What do you call ‘often’?”