by Roald Dahl
He paused and pushed his empty glass away from him into the middle of the table.
"And so I never jink," he added, "at least hardly ever."
"I jinked once," I said, "ground-strafing I thought I'd kill the ones on the other side of the road instead."
"Everybody jinks," he said. "Shall we have another drink?"
"Yes, let's have another."
I called the waiter and gave the order, and while we were waiting, we sat looking around the room at the other people. The place was starting to fill up because it was about six o'clock and we sat there looking at the people who were coming in. They were standing around looking for tables, sitting down, laughing and ordering drinks.
"Look at that woman," I said. "The one just sitting down over there."
"What about her?"
"Wonderful figure," I said. "Wonderful bosom. Look at her bosom."
The waiter brought the drinks.
"Did I ever tell you about Stinker?" he said. "Stinker who?"
"Stinker Sullivan in Malta."
"No.11 "About Stinker's dog?"
"No.11 "Stinker had a dog, a great big Alsatian, and he loved that dog as though it was his father and his mother and everything else he had, and the dog loved Stinker. It used to follow him around everywhere he went, and when he went on ops it used to sit on the tarmac outside the hangars waiting for him to come back. It was called Smith. Stinker really loved that dog. He loved it like his mother and he used to talk to it all day long."
"Lousy whisky," I said.
"Yes, let's have another."
We got some more whisky.
"Well anyway," he went on, "one day the squadron got orders to fly to Egypt. We had to go at once; not in two hours or later in the day, but at once. And Stinker couldn't find his dog. Couldn't find Smith anywhere. Started running all over the aerodrome yelling for Smith and going mad yelling at everyone asking where he was and yelling Smith Smith all over the aerodrome. Smith wasn't anywhere."
"Where was he?" I said.
"He wasn't there and we had to go. Stinker had to go without Smith and he was mad as a hatter. His crew said he kept calling up over the radio asking if they'd found him. All the way to Heliopolis he kept calling up Malta saying, have you got Smith, and Malta kept saying no, they hadn't."
"This whisky is really terrible," I said.
"Yes. We must have some more."
We had a waiter who was very quick.
"I was telling you about Stinker," he said.
"Yes, tell me about Stinker."
"Well, when we got to Egypt he wouldn't talk about anything except Smith. He used to walk around acting as though the dog was always with him. Damn fool walked around saying, "Come on, Smith, old boy come on,' and he kept looking down and talking to him as he walked along. Kept reaching down and patting the air and stroking this bloody dog that wasn't there."
"Where was it?"
" Malta, I suppose. Must have been in Malta."
"Isn't this awful whisky?"
"Terrible. We must have some more when we've finished this."
"Cheers."
"Cheers."
"Waiter. Oh waiter. Yes; again."
"So Smith was in Malta."
"Yes," he said. "And this damn fool Stinker Sullivan went on like this right up to the time he was killed."
"Must have been mad."
"He was. Mad as a hatter. You know once he walked into the Sporting Club at Alexandria at drinking time."
"That wasn't so mad."
"He walked into the big lounge and as he went in he held the door open and started calling his dog. Then when he thought the dog had come in he closed the door and started walking right down the length of the room, stopping every now and then and looking round and saying, "Come on, Smith, old boy, come on.' He kept flipping his fingers. Once he got down under a table where two men and two women were drinking. He got on to his hands and knees and said, "Smith, come on out of there; come here at once,' and he put out his hand and started dragging nothing at all from under the table. Then he apologized to the people at the table. "This is the hell of a dog,' he said to them. You should have seen their faces. He went on like that all down the room and when he came to the other end he held the door open for the dog to go out and then went out after it."
"Man was mad."
"Mad as a hatter. And you should have seen their faces. It was full of people drinking and they didn't know whether it was them who were crazy or whether it was Stinker. They kept looking up at each other to make sure that they weren't the only ones who couldn't see the dog. One man dropped his drink."
"That was awful."
"Terrible."
The waiter came and went. The room was full of people now, all sitting at little tables, talking and drinking and wearing their uniforms. The pilot poked the ice down into his glass with his finger.
"He used to jink too," he said.
"Who?"
"Stinker. He used to talk about it."
"Jinking isn't anything," I said. "It's like not touching the cracks on the pavement when you're walking along."
"Balls. That's just personal. Doesn't affect anyone else."
"Well, it's like car-waiting."
"What's car-waiting?"
"I always do it," I said.
"What is it?"
"Just as you're going to drive off, you sit back and count twenty, then you drive off."
"You're mad too," he said. "You're like Stinker."
"It's a wonderful way to avoid accidents. I've never had one in a car yet; at least, not a bad one."
"You're drunk."
"No, I always do it."
"Why?"
"Because then if someone was going to have stepped off the kerb in front of your car, you won't hit them because you started later. You were delayed because you counted twenty, and the person who stepped off the kerb whom you would have hit-you missed him."
"Why?"
"He stepped off the kerb long before you got there because you counted twenty."
"That's a good idea."
"I know it's a good idea."
"It's a bloody marvellous idea."
"I've saved lots of lives. And you can drive straight across intersections because the car you would have hit has already gone by. It went by just a little earlier because you delayed yourself by counting twenty."
"Marvellous."
"Isn't it?"
"But it's like jinking," he said. "You never really know what would have happened."
"I always do it," I said.
We kept right on drinking.
"Look at that woman," I said.
"The one with the bosom?"
"Yes, marvellous bosom."
He said slowly, "I bet I've killed lots of women more beautiful than that one."
"Not lots with bosoms like that."
"I'll bet I have. Shall we have another drink?"
"Yes, one for the road."
"There aren't any other women with bosoms like that," I said. "Not in Germany anyway."
"Oh yes there are. I've killed lots of them."
"All right. You've killed lots of women with wonderful bosoms."
He leaned back and waved his hand around the room. "See all the people in this room," he said.
"Yes."
"Wouldn't there be a bloody row if they were all suddenly dead; if they all suddenly fell off their chairs on to the floor dead?"
"What about it?"
"Wouldn't there be a bloody row?"
"Certainly there'd be a row."
"If all the waiters got together and put stuff in all the drinks and everyone died."
"There'd be a godalmighty row."
"Well, I've done that hundreds of times. I've killed more people than there are in this room hundreds of times. So have you."
"Lots more," I said. "But that's different."
"Same sort of people. Men and women and waiters. All drinking in a pub."
"That's different."<
br />
"Like hell it is. Wouldn't there be a bloody row if it happened here?"
"Bloody awful row."
"But we've done it. Lots of times."
"Hundreds of times," I said. "This is nothing."
"This is a lousy place."
"Yes, it's lousy. Let's go somewhere else."
"Finish our drinks."
We finished our drinks and we both tried to pay the bill, so we tossed for it and I won. It came to sixteen dollars and twenty-five cents. He gave the waiter a two-dollar tip.
We got up and walked around the tables and over to the door.
"Taxi," he said.
"Yes, must have a taxi."
There wasn't a doorman. We stood out on the kerb waiting for a taxi to come along and he said, "This is a good town."
"Wonderful town," I said. I felt fine. It was dark outside, but there were a few street-lamps, and we could see the cars going by and the people walking on the other side of the street. There was a thin, quiet drizzle falling, and the wetness on the black street shone yellow under the lights of the cars arid under the street-lamps. The tyres of the cars hissed on the wet surface.
"Let's go to a place which has lots of whisky," he said. "Lots of whisky and a man with egg on his beard serving it."
"Fine."
"Somewhere where there are no other people but just us and the man with egg on his beard. Either that."
"Yes," I said. "Either that or what?"
"Or a place with a hundred thousand people in it."
"Yes," I said. "OK."
We stood there waiting and we could see the lights of the cars as they came round the bend over to the left, coming towards us with the tyres swishing on the wet surface and going past us up the road to the bridge which goes over the river. We could see the drizzle falling through the beams of their headlights and we stood there waiting for a taxi.
SWITCH BITCH
The Visitor
NOT long ago, a large wooden case was deposited at the door of my house by the railway delivery service. It was an unusually strong and well-constructed object, and made of some kind of darkred hardwood, not unlike mahogany. I lifted it with great difficulty on to a table in the garden, and examined it carefully. The stencilling on one side said that it had been shipped from Haifa by the rn/v Waverley Star, but I could find no sender's name or address. I tried to think of somebody living in Haifa or thereabouts who might be wanting to send me a magnificent present. I could think of no one. I walked slowly to the toolshed, still pondering the matter deeply, and returned with a hammer and screwdriver. Then I began gently to prise open the top of the case.
Behold, it was filled with books! Extraordinary books! One by one, I lifted them all out (not yet looking inside any of them) and stacked them in three tall piles on the table. There were twentyeight volumes altogether, and very beautiful they were indeed. Each of them was identically and superbly bound in rich green morocco, with the initials O. H. C. and a Roman numeral (I to XXVIII) tooled in gold upon the spine.
I took up the nearest volume, number XVI, and opened it. The unlined white pages were filled with a neat small handwriting in black ink. On the title page was written "1934'. Nothing else. I took up another volume, number XXI. It contained more manuscript in the same handwriting, but on the title page it said "1939'. I put it down and pulled out Volume I, hoping to find a preface of some kind there, or perhaps the author's name. Instead, I found an envelope inside the cover. The envelope was addressed to me. I took out the letter it contained and glanced quickly at the signature. Oswald Hendryks Cornelius, it said.
It was Uncle Oswald!
No member of the family had heard from Uncle Oswald for over thirty years. This letter was dated 10 March 1964, and until its arrival, we could only assume that he still existed. Nothing was really known about him except that he lived in France, that he travelled a great deal, that he was a wealthy bachelor with unsavoury but glamorous habits who steadfastly refused to have anything to do with his own relatives. The rest was all rumour and hearsay, but the rumours were so splendid and the hearsay so exotic that Oswald had long since become a shining hero and a legend to us all.
"My dear boy,' the letter began, I believe that you and your three sisters are my closest surviving blood relations. You are therefore my rightful heirs, and because I have made no will, all that I leave behind me when I die will be yours. Alas, I have nothing to leave. I used to have quite a lot, and the fact that I have recently disposed of it all in my own way is none of your business. As consolation, though, I am sending you my private diaries. These, I think, ought to remain in the family. They cover all the best years of my life, and it will do you no harm to read them. But if you show them around or lend them to strangers, you do so at your own great peril. If you publish them, then that, I should imagine, would be the end of both you and your publisher simultaneously. For you must understand that thousands of the heroines whom I mention in the diaries are still only half dead, and if you were foolish enough to splash their lilywhite reputation with scarlet print, they would have your head on a salver in two seconds flat, and probably roast it in the oven for good measure. So you'd better be careful. I only met you once. That was years ago, in 1921, when your family was living in that large ugly house in South Wales. I was your big uncle and you were a very small boy, about five years old. I don't suppose you remember the young Norwegian nurse-maid you had then. A remarkably clean, well-built girl she was, and exquisitely shaped even in her uniform with its ridiculous starchy white shield concealing her lovely bosom. The afternoon I was there, she was taking you for a walk in the woods to pick bluebells, and I asked if I might come along. And when we got well into the middle of the woods, I told you I'd give you a bar of chocolate if you could find your own way home. And you did (see Vol. III). You were a sensible child. Farewell -Oswald Hendryks Cornelius.
The sudden arrival of the diaries caused much excitement in the family, and there was a rush to read them. We were not disappointed. It was astonishing stuff hilarious, witty, exciting, and often quite touching as well. The man's vitality was unbelievable. He was always on the move, from city to city, from country to country, from woman to woman, and in between the women, he would be searching for spiders in Kashmir or tracking down a blue porcelain vase in Nanking. But the women always came first. Wherever he went, he left an endless trail of females in his wake, females ruffled and ravished beyond words, but purring like cats.
Twenty-eight volumes with exactly three hundred pages to each volume takes a deal of reading, and there are precious few writers who could hold an audience over a distance like that. But Oswald did it. The narrative never seemed to lose its flavour, the pace seldom slackened, and almost without exception, every single entry, whether it was long or short, and whatever the subject, became a marvellous little individual story that was complete in itself. And at the end of it all, when the last page of the volume had been read, one was left with the rather breathless feeling that this might just possibly be one of the major autobiographical works of our time.
If it were regarded solely as a chronicle of a man's amorous adventures, then without a doubt there was nothing to touch it. Casanova's Memoirs read like a Parish Magazine in comparison, and the famous lover himself, beside Oswald, appears positively undersexed.
There was social dynamite on every page; Oswald was right about that. But he was surely wrong in thinking that the explosions would all come from the women. What about their husbands, the humiliated cock-sparrows, the cuckolds? The cuckold, when aroused, is a very fierce bird indeed, and there would be thousands upon thousands of them rising up out of the bushes if The Cornelius Diaries, unabridged, saw the light of day while they were still alive. Publication, therefore, was right out of the question.
A pity, this. Such a pity, in fact, that I thought something ought to be done about it. So I sat down and re-read the diaries from beginning to end in the hope that I might discover at least one complete passage which could be pri
nted and published without involving both the publisher and myself in serious litigation. To my joy, I found no less than six. I showed them to a lawyer. He said he thought they might be "safe', but he wouldn't guarantee it. One of them-The Sinai Desert Episode-seemed "safer' than the other five, he added.
So I have decided to start with that one and to offer it for publication right away, at the end of this short preface. If it is accepted and all goes well, then perhaps I shall release one or two more.
The Sinai entry is from the last volume of all, Vol. XXVIII, and is dated 24 August 1946. In point of fact, it is the very last entry of the last volume of all, the last thing Oswald ever wrote, and we have no record of where he went or what he did after that date. One can only guess. You shall have the entry verbatim in a moment, but first of all, and so that you may more easily understand some of the things Oswald says and does in his story, let me try to tell you a little about the man himself. Out of the mass of confession and opinion contained in those twenty-eight volumes, there emerges a fairly clear picture of his character.
At the time of the Sinai episode, Oswald Hendryks Cornelius was fifty-one years old, and he had, of course, never been married. "I am afraid," he was in the habit of saying, "that I have been blessed or should I call it burdened, with an uncommonly fastidious nature."
In some ways, this was true, but in others, and especially in so far as marriage was concerned, the statement was the exact opposite of the truth.
The real reason Oswald had refused to get married was simply that he had never in his life been able to confine his attentions to one particular woman for longer than the time it took to conquer her. When that was done, he lost interest and looked around for another victim.
A normal man would hardly consider this a valid reason for remaining single, but Oswald was not a normal man. He was not even a normal polygamous man. He was, to be honest, such a wanton and incorrigible philanderer that no bride on earth would have put up with him for more than a few days, let alone for the duration of a honeymoon although heaven knows there were enough who would have been willing to give it a try.