by Gerald Kersh
“No, sir.”
“Or the stork brought you—is that it?”
“No, sir.”
“Then how d’you think you got here, eh?”
The gentleman opened the album. He was breathing heavily. “Look here,” he said, pointing with a finger that was no longer steady; “does this convey anything to you? Look … this is your father and that’s your mother … And that’s your mother—the fellow with his back turned is your father. Do you take me? Now,” said the gentleman, watching Pym closely as he turned a page, this is your father and mother again——”
“No!” cried Pym, stepping back as the gentleman reached out to hold him. No!” He ran out of the room and fell downstairs. As he found his feet he caught a glimpse of the manservant, who was wringing his hands and saying: “Oh, dzear! Have you hurtz yourtself, my dzear?” Pym pushed him aside, and opened the street door and ran. A quarter of an hour later, sobbing for breath on the promenade, he felt something hard in his armpit. It was The Ivory Kloof. He threw the book from him with all his strength: it fell on the beach, close to a woman in a red bathing costume. “Hi!” she cried; but Pym was running again.
That evening he disconcerted his mother by saying: “You didn’t! … You didn’t! You never did, did you?”
“What didn’t I, Johnny?”
He burst into tears and would not let her comfort him.
Reading the work of Dr. Weissensee he remembered the gentleman in the blue blazer and the album in the gun-room—which he did not want to remember.
“Not on any account,” said Pym. “Oh no!” He put the typescript back in its folder and threw the folder into the empty, musty-smelling wardrobe.
*
Then he went back to work. The meaning of the language was lost—he was like a feverish man with sticky fingers, playing a game of skill with paper patterns. Sky fitted flesh; water fell into place with grass—everything meant nothing. There was mutiny in the alphabet; King Lud on the keyboard of the typewriter—syntactic anarchy, verbal nihilism, grammatical delirium; heat without fire, flame without direction, high temperature with a chill.
All the same, he rewrote the article about Covent Garden Market.
Someone knocked at the door and said: “Do you mind? After all, I mean to say—quarter to one in the morning, after all! People want to get a bit of shut-eye, if you don’t mind. Do you mind?”
“So sorry; I didn’t realise it was so late,” said Pym. “I beg pardon.”
The man at the door, made bold by Pym’s humility, said: “All right, then; that’s all right. But you just have a little consideration for others in future. Remember—you been told once.”
“Why, you snotty-nosed bastard!” said Pym, opening the door. “You lousy mouse!”
A small fat man, recoiling, with out-thrust hands, said: “Now, now—no violence. None of that, now!”
“Go to hell!” said Pym.
“Legitimate complaint,” said the other man. “Banging away all night long. I know my rights.”
“Stick your rights——”
“No foul language, now!”
“One last word: go away quick,” said Pym; and the small fat man ran downstairs.
After this Pym wanted a cigarette; but his packet was empty. It was lying on the floor with twenty or thirty crumpled and discarded sheets of paper.
He tore open and teased out four cold cigarette-butts, rolled the damp, stale tobacco again in an oblong of tissue-paper torn from the inner wrapper of the packet, and smoked.
He would have gone out to buy a fresh packet but he had only elevenpence-halfpenny. Proudfoot had said that five-pound note was something on account, something on the firm. Therefore Pym could not touch it. He had elevenpence-halfpenny. “Thank God I’m so tired!” he said, lying down and looking at the ceiling. It was as well for him that the paper was coarse and the tobacco damp. he fell asleep with the cigarette between his fingers. It became black and extinguished itself ten seconds after he stopped sucking it.
The pennies in the meter spent themselves, the electric light turned itself off, and Pym slept peacefully in the stuffy darkness of his squalid room.
INTERLUDE
HE was awaked by an insistent tapping at his door.
“Who is it?”
A heavy voice, harsh and sad as a death-rattle, said: “Me.”
“Mr. M’Gurk?”
“In person, Mr. Pym.”
“What d’you want at this hour of the night?”
“It’s ten o’clock in the morning.”
“Good God! … One moment.” Pym had no dressing-gown, so he pulled on his trousers before he opened the door. “So sorry,” he said, “I didn’t realise it was so late.”
“Pray pardon the intrusion,” said Mr. M’Gurk. He was a long, lank, suicidal man who appeared to have resigned himself to some ineluctable woe. In the profession he was known as ‘Miserable M’Gurk’—he was an entertainer: M’Gurk & M’Gurk had been printed in blunt blue letters in the lower corners of numerous double-crown bills pasted on boards outside provincial theatres and suburban ‘Empires’. He played a trombone, with comical grimaces, while his wife—a buxom giantess—burlesqued arias from the most dramatic operas. Her name was Nina; she played the piccolo and danced with amazing agility considering her vast bulk. The piccolo, in her hands, looked like a pencil: that was why she played it. They had a fifteen-year-old son—a ghastly, wizened, undersized boy, who was learning to play the double-bass fiddle. The incongruity was funny: Babe M’Gurk had to stand on a step-ladder when he played. The three of them had been living in Busto’s second-floor room for two months. Three weeks before, Mr. M’Gurk had asked Pym for the loan of a match.
“Keep the box, if you like,” said Pym.
M’Gurk did so; but two days later he sent Pym a brand-new box of matches in an envelope, with an invitation to “Come and take wine” with his family. It was only a bottle of pale ale, provocative of urine rather than conviviality, but Pym was attracted by the M’Gurks. Mr. M’Gurk had a funereal face and a bacchanalian soul: Pym relished the contrast; and he liked Nina M’Gurk for her uninhibited laughter and her coarse, kind, shameless talk. He saw her as an honest woman, and he loved honesty.
“No intrusion, Mr. M’Gurk,” he said. “What’s up?”
“Nina, Boysie and I would like to say good-bye to you.”
“What? Are you thinking of leaving?”
“We are on our way.”
“Where are you off to?” asked Pym.
“We are going from Hither to Thither,” said M’Gurk. “Come and say farewell to the Little Woman.”
“Ten minutes,” said Pym. Having shaved and dressed he went downstairs with his rewritten article in his pocket. Nina M’Gurk greeted him with a wet, noisy kiss and shouted:
“Here we go again, Mr. Pym—off again! Off on our travels again! Here to-day and gone to-morrow! That’s life for you. Come along in, dear, just to say good-bye.”
Pym saw then that Mr. M’Gurk’s cadaverous face was more lank and rigid than usual. The boy, Boysie, was tying up an insecure suitcase with a length of cord.
“Is anything wrong?” asked Pym.
Boysie answered him; he said: “The usual.”
“Usual?”
“On our way again,” said Nina, laughing. But she sucked her laughter in—she did not let it out. “On our way again, thank God! Don’t you pity the poor beggars that get stuck in steady jobs? Payments on the house, payments on the furniture, endowment policy, burial society? Burial society!—I ask you.” She choked on a big, fat laugh. “Burial society!”
“Nina,” said Mr. M’Gurk; and his macabre face came alive and became sad. “Neens, darling!”
She could not stop laughing. “But I ask you—burial society!” she gasped. “Can you imagine me?”
Boysie rose with a sigh, threw down the cord, dipped a sticky tumbler into the jug on the washstand and threw water into her face. She stopped laughing and began to cry. Boysie went ba
ck to work.
“The little woman,” said Mr. M’Gurk, tenderly wiping her face with a coloured handkerchief, “is fed up and I, for one, can’t blame her.”
“I’ve never had anything,” said Nina M’Gurk; and she turned and hid her face in a pillow. Her husband made an apologetic gesture.
“It’s the old, old story,” said Boysie. “We flopped again—Acton Hippodrome. Nearest we ever got to the West End, wasn’t it, Pop?”
“Willesden,” said Mr. M’Gurk in his sepulchral croak, “that was the nearest.”
“And so here we are again,” said Boysie.
“I’m sorry,” said Nina, sitting up. “I’ve never behaved like this before.”
“Oh, no,” muttered Boysie.
“—But I get tired. Twenty years I’ve had to put up with it. Boysie was born in the Intake Infirmary. I was on the stage until . . the labour pains started before I finished my act … but I went on. Didn’t I?”
“Neens, love!” said Mr. M’Gurk.
Boysie said: “If you want to know, the act’s corny. It stinks—that’s what it does—pooh!” He held his nose and pulled an imaginary lavatory chain.
“I’ve never had a house or any place of my own; I’ve never had any furniture of my own; I’ve never had any credit—I’ve never had anything,” said Nina. “And this is the thirty-first time we’ve been kicked out into the street for not paying our rent. One pound a week, and we haven’t even got that! And I can’t pawn the instruments again! I can’t do it! How did I get them out last time?”
“Stop talking,” said Mr. M’Gurk.
“Why don’t you change your act?” said Pym.
Nina went on: “Do you know how I got his trombone out last time? I——”
“Listen,” said Pym, dreading what he expected to hear, “listen. I have an idea, only you must listen. Will you listen?”
“Listen to Mr. Pym,” said Mr. M’Gurk.
Pym thought hard and fast. “You’ve had setbacks—troubles,” he said; “why not make capital out of them?”
“How?” asked Mr. M’Gurk.
“Well, you say your act flops: you say its ‘corny’.”
While his father hesitated the little boy said: “Did I say ‘corny’? It’s a twenty-two-carat bastard and a three-star stinkeroo. The trouble with the old man is he’s too conservative. And the trouble with the old woman is she’s got no ideas, except when it comes to talking about her troubles.”
“Have more respect for your parents,” said Mr. M’Gurk.
The boy replied: “Why should I? What have you done that I should have any respect for you? I’m fed up to the back teeth with the two or you, and if you want to know I’m only waiting till I’m a bit older and then I’ll scram out of it so fast you won’t see my arse for dust. So put that in your pipe and smoke it.”
“We’ve done the best we can for you, you wicked boy,” said Nina, beginning to cry again.
“Oh, shut up, for Christ’s sake, or I’ll chuck some more water over you!”
Pym said: “If this precocious little ape will allow me to get a word in edgeways, I’ll give you an idea for a new act.”
“I’d give everything I’ve got for a suitable idea,” said M’Gurk; at which the boy laughed sardonically.
“This one might work,” said Pym. “Here are the bare bones of the thing—it would need any amount of elaboration, of course. You know how other people’s troubles, when they get to a certain point, become comical? Well, that’s the basis of the idea. I’m reminded of the story about the man who got into the railway carriage with two little boys, calling them all the dirty names he could think of. He gave one of them a smack in the face and knocked him into one corner saying: ‘Sit there, you dirty little bastard’; and he smacked the other one into another corner and said: ‘Not another word from you, you rotten little clod.’ Gentleman in carriage says: ‘How dare you treat those poor children like that? Do you realise that if I made a complaint I could get you into trouble?’ And the man said: ‘You could get me into trouble. You could get me into trouble! My old woman’s in the luggage van blind drunk, being sick into the portmanteau; my daughter’s in the carriage be’ind, in the fambly way and won’t tell us ’oo the bloke is; that little rat’s wet ’isself, and the other one’s swallowed the bloody tickets. Go on, get me into trouble.’ You see what I mean: trouble is very funny indeed when it happens to somebody else. Now, why don’t you make an act out of your troubles? You, M’Gurk, you get yourself up like an English nobleman of the 1890’s, with a long miserable gingery moustache, miserable droopy ginger side-whiskers, miserable black frock-coat down to your ankles and a ridiculous little bowler hat. And—yes, so help me God!—little Caligula over there could be the dog. You dress him up to look like an extra melancholy bloodhound on yards and yards of chain, looking miserable as sin. Mrs. M’Gurk, also, looks like the wrath of God in very heavy widow’s weeds and red eyes and red nose. She keeps crying all the time and blowing her nose with a trumpety noise, and every time she does so she takes out a fresh black-edged handkerchief. Something of that sort. Get it? The scene is a pub. She’s the barmaid, if you like, and you’re the customer. You come in, making the most of that graveyard voice of yours, and ask for a drink of water and an arrowroot biscuit for the dog. You’re muffled up to the chin in a sort of old school scarf and you talk like Lord Dundreary. Your voice, M’Gurk, dragged out into a Piccadilly Johnny drawl—well, you try it and see. Say: ‘Gwoss cawicatuah—no fellah evah saw such a fellah!’”
M’Gurk said it, and the effect was indeed ineffably comical. Even the little boy smiled.
“Go on, darling,” said Nina.
“Now the detail has to be worked out later,” said Pym. “But it goes something like this. The old Johnny with the dog is chock full of the most preposterous troubles. Anything you like—you can’t lay it on too thick. No need to elaborate now, but it has to be outrageous—his ninety-year-old grandmother has died in childbirth, but the baby lived to inherit the family fortune—that kind of rubbish. But Mrs. M’Gurk, also, is bubbling over with her own misfortunes. (Incidentally, the dog, also, is always in trouble, choking himself on his chain, wanting to pee, getting trodden on, and whatnot.) Well, you interrupt each other with a list of absolutely shocking catastrophes, getting drunker and drunker all the time; until at last M’Gurk, gulping his last drink with a hollow croak, says something so awful that you say. ‘If I were you, deary, I’d cut my froat.’ And M’Gurk says: ‘I have.’ Exeunt, pursued by a cat.”
Nina M’Gurk cried: “Why, I like that!”
Her husband said: “So do I; but what about the wardrobe?”
The boy said: “This man’s got more brains in his little toe than you’ve got in both your heads put together, you couple of washouts. What do you mean—‘What about the wardrobe? Sell the trombone, sell that soppy little fife and the silly old bull-fiddle. We can get a good price for the trombone. Go to Isaacson; give him something on account, and tell him George Black gave us a sub. We don’t want much. The most important thing is the dog-suit.”
Pym looked at the boy with respect: here was the real master of the house. “Little Caligula will go far,” he said. “In fact, he may even go too far.”
“We need to sketch out the act, weigh up the gags, and rehearse the routine,” said M’Gurk.
“This man will write us a piece,” said the boy.
Pym said: “Well, I don’t mind roughing the thing out for you, if that would be helpful.”
“—Sell the instruments! Sell every damn thing,” said Nina. “Mr. Pym, you’re a darling. I don’t know how to thank you.”
“It’s nothing,” said Pym.
M’Gurk grasped him by the hand in a painful, uncomfortably wet grip and said: “I’m a fatalist; I always was. I knew—a little voice whispered—I knew this house would bring us luck. Didn’t I say so, Neens?”
“You’re a clever old darling,” said Nina.
The boy said to Pym: “Look; do you
think you could manage to let us have something to work on in a day or so? … What a change it is to meet a really clever man! You see what I have to put up with, with these two. I do want to get somewhere and be somebody, and I’m so grateful to you.” Then he did something embarrassing: he kissed Pym’s hand.
“All right, all right,” said Pym. “I’ll see what I can do.”
As he left the room he heard Mr. M’Gurk saying: “Well, I’ll go and flog these instruments. As a matter of fact they never brought us any luck.”
The boy said: “We’ll go to Roseneck. You carry them, and I’ll go in. You wait outside and I’ll do the talking.”
Visualising himself as a dealer in musical instruments, Pym imagined that he was standing behind a counter, fitting a new reed into an old clarinet when the little wizened boy came in carrying a double bass and a trombone, with a piccolo sticking out of his breast pocket. Give him a good price? Roseneck would probably give him the shop.
Pym left his article with the porter at the Sunday Special and walked towards Adam Street. But he remembered then that he had left Dr. Weissensee’s typescript in the wardrobe. He was not sorry: he feared the inevitable unanswered argument, the ratiocination and the cajoling of Proudfoot. So he telephoned the office. Joanna Bowman said: “Thurtell Hunt, Mayerling?”
“John Pym here. How are you?”
“Oh, hullo; how are you?”
“Look, will you tell Proudfoot I can’t get along to-day and I’ll ring him to-morrow morning?”
“You can’t get along to-day and will ring Mr. Proudfoot to-morrow morning.”
“When do we meet?”
“To-night, if you like.”
“Where?”
“Anywhere you like, within reason. Come up to my place, if you like.”
“I will, if I may.”
“Make it about eight o’clock, then.”
“I was hoping to take you to dinner or something.”
“I don’t feel much like going out in the evenings these days. I’ll make an omelette. Good-bye.”