by Gerald Kersh
*
Joanna Bowman paused on the bridge to look at the river and think. She loved the river, and saw something beautiful in the spidery silhouettes of the cranes that broke the milky sky above the wharves. Then she went on her way and stopped again at Millbank, where she watched the cigarette packets jostling the driftwood on the face of the water. She was sad, but calm. Why on earth shouldn’t he take a blonde home? she asked herself. I took him home. He is entitled to do exactly as he pleases. Surely, that’s what one lives for. I do as I please; he does what he likes. But the thing I’d like to know is, what on earth can a man like that see in a thing like her? Good God, when she came out of that bathroom with nothing on she looked like a maggot, a hairless maggot; narrow in the shoulder, narrow in the hips, narrow in the head—not a good woman for him. Good for some old man. A dead end. What on earth could he want her for? A blonde, scraping herself with a safety razor and making exhibitions. What for? What use? She’d deceive him with the milkman, and get away with it. But of course, I ought to know: the thing to do is, make goggle eyes and look as if you admire. I’ll see myself in hell first. I’ll see myself in hell, if I die this minute.
Looking at a seagull, she wished that she had been hatched out of a pure, loveless egg. She wanted to be alone, upheld by her own white wings, somewhere between air and water, out of sight of land, in the middle of a grey sea. She wanted to find herself in some crack in a remote rock, blanketed in herself, warmed by her own heat, alone and at peace.
But when she reached the front door of the house in which she lived a hoarse voice said: “Jo! Once and for all, Jo. This is once and for all. I want one word with you, one final word, once and for all.”
It was Tom Swan, her husband. She said: “You want one word? All right then; here it is—No.”
“Who is it you’re in love with now?”
“Nobody. Go away.”
“But there’s somebody else. I know there is. I know it. I tell you I know. Isn’t there?”
“What has it to do with you if there is?”
“I’ll kill him.”
“Well, Tom, good night.”
“I’ll kill you, Jo.”
“Kill me or don’t kill me, but for God’s sake stop moaning about it. And take your hands off me, will you, please?”
“Is this your last word?”
“I’ve told you a thousand times already.”
“Oh, Jo, Jo—where do you keep your heart?”
“Oh Tom, Tom—where do you keep your head?”
“You can see how I’m suffering. It makes you happy,” said Tom Swan. “You want me to suffer. You want me to be unhappy. It makes you feel clever when you make me miserable.”
“Look, Tom: I’m somebody—a person, a woman. You want me. I don’t want you. So you impose your sufferings on me. You want me to make a martyr of myself for the sake of your well-being. You want me to stop being myself so that you haven’t got to be miserable. You want me to be miserable for you. Well, I won’t. Just because you want me—so I’m heartless because I don’t want you? Tom, you may go to the devil.”
“You said you loved me once.”
“I don’t love you, Tom.”
“You said you did.”
“I thought I did. But I don’t. Poor Tom, dear Tom, if I hurt you I’m sorry. But be sensible, for God’s sake. What’d be the use if I went back to you? I couldn’t be more than just patient with you, even if we were together again. And you’d eat your heart out trying to make me love you; and the more you tried to make me love you the more you’d get on my nerves. No, no, no, Tom—break it up once and for all. I never wanted to be unkind to you. I know I’ve hurt you. I’m as sorry as hell, Tom. But positively, no.”
“You’re in love with somebody else.”
“That’s neither here nor there.”
“You are!”
“The point is, I’m not in love with you; and I’m not going to live with you.”
“You’re in love with somebody else!”
“So will you be, Tom. Just be patient.”
“I won’t let you be in love with anybody else,” said Tom Swan.
“Let me? But how could you stop me? Be reasonable, Tom. Even if I went back to you to-night, how could you stop me being in love with the policeman on the corner, or the milkman, or the Prime Minister, or the postman, or Clark Gable? How?”
“I won’t let you, Jo. I swear I won’t let you.”
“Good night, Tom,” said Joanna Bowman,
Her husband took from his hip pocket one of those sheath-knives that are sold in the novelty-shops for five shillings—something like a hunting knife, with an imitation-leather handle. “Does this convey anything to you?” he said.
“I rather think you’re going completely out of your mind. Go and sleep it off. Good night.”
“I daresay you think I wouldn’t use this.”
“I don’t think, I don’t know, and I don’t care. I don’t give a damn what you would or wouldn’t do. Only go away and leave me alone.”
“Oh Jo, Jo, I can’t live without you. Jo, can’t you understand that I can’t live without you?”
“And can’t you understand that I can’t live with you? Do please stop making such a fool of yourself. Please get out of my way and let me go to bed.”
Tom Swan said: “I swear to God, I’d see you dead at my feet before I’d think of you in somebody else’s bed. Yes, by God in heaven I would! When I think of all we’ve … No, by God in heaven—you won’t! When I think of somebody else being … No, no, oh Joanna, dearest one … oh please, please, please, please!”
“Please, Tom, do go away.”
“But I love you.”
“What right have you to persecute me just because you love me? If I loved you and you didn’t love me, would I persecute you?”
“My God, how I hate you! God, what a rotten woman you are! I never thought it possible for a woman to be so beastly,” said Tom Swan.
“How typical,” said Joanna, “how beautifully typical of a man! ‘I hate you, I loathe you, I detest you, I want to kill you, you’re mean, you’re cold, you’re beastly, you’re rotten … Oh please, please, please, please, come back to me!’ Now for the last time, go away. Nothing you say or do will ever make any difference. You know me well enough to know that when I say a thing I mean it and dynamite wouldn’t move me. And your crying and whimpering only makes me all the more determined never, never, never to have anything more to do with you. Is that clear enough for you?”
“Jo, I’d rather kill you than think of you with somebody else. And I wouldn’t care if they hanged me. I wouldn’t give a damn. They’d save me the trouble of hanging myself. I swear I’ll kill you if you don’t come back to me.”
“Why,” cried Joanna, “how dare you? How dare you insult me by thinking that your little threats could possibly intimidate me into doing something I didn’t want to do? The vanity of it! The conceit of it! The presumption! To threaten me!”
She threw back her head and laughed. The laugh ended in a strangled hiccup as the knife went in up to the hilt under her ribs.
Pym arrived breathless half a minute later and saw Joanna lying on her back in the half-shadow beyond the light of the street lamp outside her door.
A policeman was there already, blowing a whistle, and a crowd was gathering.
“Wheee! Listen to the flutes!” said a small, monkey-faced man, dancing with delight. “The flutes—listen to ’em!”
Police-whistles were blowing a hundred yards away, in the Vauxhall-bridge Road. Tom Swan, running madly into the dark, had been knocked down by a one-ton truck loaded with potato-crisps in square tins. The driver of the truck was trembling in the doorway of a bookshop. The road was littered with tins.
“Ukh-ukh!” said Tom Swan, coughing himself to death.
*
In the small hours of the morning Pym went to the Westminster Hospital and said: “The lady who was killed in William and Mary Square this evening
… I want to give her these——” He held up an enormous bunch of ill-assorted dying flowers which he had bought from a pleasantly surprised costermonger.
The man on duty smiled at him in a fatherly way and said: “The young lady wasn’t killed. So she’ll enjoy your flowers all the more, you see.”
“Did I hear you say not killed?” cried Pym.
“You mustn’t shout, sir. No, she wasn’t killed. She’s alive.”
“Is she badly hurt?”
“I couldn’t say.”
Later Pym learned that Joanna Bowman was in a critical condition but was as comfortable as she could be in the circumstances. He went home, exhausted. All the lights in the flat were on, and the gas fire was roaring, white hot, in the sitting-room. Win was asleep on his bed; she was wearing one of his new shirts. He took hold of her by a wrist and an ankle and dragged her to the floor where she sat up and said: “Johnny darling, you frightened me!”
“Dress and get out.”
“But Johnny, get out where?”
“Dress here in two minutes or dress in the passage. Two minutes.”
“But where am I to go?”
“Just go. Damn you,” said Pym, shaking a fist under her nose, “if it hadn’t been for you….”
His anger gagged him. Win looked shrewdly at his face, and said: “Yes, Johnny.” She left hurriedly, and was in the street when the first birds, delivered from the perils of the night, were singing at the dawn.
CHAPTER TWENTY
PYM did not go to bed. He paced the floor, savagely cursing Win and hating himself for ever having pitied her. He spat with disgust and opened the window. The room seemed to stink of her, as if she had lived there for years. Wherever he turned he found evidence of Win. Win’s fine blonde hair was in the comb. Win’s coarse mouse-coloured hair was in the safety razor. Win’s bright lipstick was on the pillow. She had laddered one of her stockings and thrown the pair away in a corner of the bathroom. The white scum of Win’s ablutions was in the hand-basin; and there were further traces of Win in the toilet—she was one of those women who can never in any circumstances make anything work. She had squeezed his toothpaste tube in the middle and he had a morbid suspicion that she had used his toothbrush. He threw it out of the window. Had she been playing with his typewriter again? He looked toward the table and felt all the blood in his body rush to his heart, leaving his skin cold and loose. The typewriter was not there. “I’ll murder the bitch!” he shouted; and then he remembered that he had put it on the pavement when he knelt down beside Joanna Bowman, and had left it there. All thought of it had been shocked out of his mind.
“What have I done to deserve this?” he said, to the ceiling.
The ceiling was silent. He answered himself: What have you done to deserve this? Everything. You born fool! You’re like a whorish idiot of a girl: she goes home with the local Casanova and says: “You mustn’t do anything, mind.” Then she takes all her clothes off because he says he only wants to have a look at her for artistic reasons. “But you mustn’t do anything wicked, mind.” Then they lie down together, because he wants company, as he says. “All right, but mind, you mustn’t take liberties.” And then when she finds herself three months pregnant she howls: “What have I done to deserve it?” … Everything, everything, you godforsaken bloody idiot! Everything to deserve all this and a thousand times more! So take it, you son of a dog, take it and like it!
And Pym kicked himself—literally, he kicked himself in the left leg.
After that he drank tea and read the morning paper, still walking about the sitting-room. There was talk of atrocities in Middle Europe, and of the possibility of war. Pym thought then that a war was just what he wanted. If there was a war he might have a little peace. He yearned for the sublime irresponsibility of the private soldier who has nothing to do but his duty and nothing to lose but his life. He wanted to be in a barrack-room, where a man can be left alone for a little while to wrap his sore mind in the warm blanket of a weary body and forget the world.
“Let there be a war. Who cares?” he muttered, turning the page. Then he saw a photograph of Sissy Voltaire under the headline:
SISSY VOLTAIRE DISCOVERS UNKNOWN GENIUS TRAGEDY OF MARY GREENSLEEVE
Clergyman’s Widow Dying of Starvation Writes Play
The story, which was written by a woman, was full of pathos. In a common lodging house in one of the poorer quarters of London, a little old lady dressed in grey, clean but threadbare, fastidiously neat in spite of her poverty, had burned herself to death trying to warm her poor old cramped hands at a fire made of her love letters (carefully cherished for many years) soaked in paraffin. They had warmed her poor old heart, and now they were to warm her poor old hands. Yet these cherished love letters brought about her destruction in the end, because she set fire to her neatly-darned clean-but-well-worn clothes and was so grievously injured that (with a tender smile on her clean but worn old face) she died, giving certain papers to a certain young man who happened to be near her at the time, and begging him with her dying breath to give them to Sissy Voltaire, the famous actress. This poor well-worn but clean and tidy packet of papers proved to be a script of a play, the merit of which Miss Sissy Voltaire instantly recognised. And now Sissy Voltaire and the promising young comedian Rocky Gagan were going to put the play on at the Pegasus Theatre. Miss Voltaire had said that it was a work of pure genius, calculated to pluck the heartstrings. It contained some of the most humorous and the most tragic passages that had ever been written for the stage. It was a comedy, yet how sad, how frightfully sad it was! …
Pym pushed the paper away. There was something like a mist in his head. Somewhere in all this there was secreted, like a gall-bladder, a dark green seed of ineffable bitterness which—if he could get his fingers on it—he would tear open; and then, by God, he would turn the over-sweetened stomach of the world!
*
They told him, at the hospital, that Joanna Bowman had had a disturbed night but was as comfortable as could be expected. He said: “I should like Miss Bowman to have a room of her own. I’ll pay for it. If you like, I can pay in advance, now. I believe that if a patient has a private room one may visit her at any time within reason? Is that so? … Would it hurt her to be moved?”
“It can be done.”
“But she isn’t going to die?”
“Now you really must be patient. Everything that can be done is being done. You can’t do any good at all by worrying.”
“I want everything done that’s humanly possible,” said Pym. “Absolutely everything. Never mind what it costs. I’m responsible. I’d like her to have a private room. I want her to have everything possible. My idea is that she might get better rather quicker if she had a little room of her own, if that could be arranged. Can I see her, now?”
“Yes, you can see her if you like, but you mustn’t excite her.”
Joanna Bowman was lying still, looking at the ceiling. Pym approached on tiptoe, holding his breath, and put on the table by her bed six hothouse peaches packed in sawdust, and a little pineapple. The sister of the ward took the bunch of roses he had brought and smiled at him. Joanna looked at him without moving her head, and whispered: “Hullo.”
“Hullo, Joanna.”
“How are you?” she asked. “You look absolutely awful.”
“The point is, how are you?”
“Not too bad. That fool stuck his toy Scout-knife into me.”
“I know. I got there just a bit too late.”
“Couldn’t even do this properly. Poor man!”
“They said you weren’t to talk too much or excite yourself.”
“This is nothing. I’ll be up again in a few days. Don’t worry about me.”
“Doesn’t it hurt like hell?”
“Only when I laugh.”
The sister came in with the flowers in a tall graduated glass. “There now,” she said, putting them where Joanna could see them, “look at the lovely roses the gentleman brought you.” She wa
s a short, strong, curiously curved, healthily ugly woman whose round flat face with its long, spiky nose reminded Pym of a sundial—a sundial that looks toward heaven and turns its own shadow to a useful purpose. Time, he thought, had no more power to spoil that face than the shadow of the gnomon, in passing, can scratch the bronze. He broke off one of the roses and put it in her cap.
“Now you look like a Spanish dancing girl,” he said.
“You go away,” said the sister. “That’s quite enough for to-day. Go on, off you go. Out you go.”
“I’ll see you again soon, Joanna,” said Pym.
“If you like. Oh, Pym.”
“Yes?”
“Thanks for the roses.”
When he was gone the sister said: “What a nice gentleman. You’re a lucky girl.”
“He’s not so bad, Carmen.”
“Carmen?” said the sister. Then she remembered the rose in her cap, and took it away with an embarrassed smile. That evening she pressed it between the leaves of a large, profusely illustrated presentation copy of the poems of Keats which had been given to her by a dying student. She had never found time to read it. The leather spine of this volume was cracking with the pressure of dried-up flowers and grateful letters for which it was a repository. She liked Pym for his devoted attention to Joanna Bowman, and she liked Joanna for her stoic acceptance of pain. They refreshed her. She knew that she had been brought into the world to be patient with the sick and the suffering, but she loved people for whom she did not have to feel sorry. She asked Mr. Stone, the surgeon, when Joanna Bowman might be moved, and he said: “Oh, I don’t know. The girl’s as strong as a bullock. She got a nasty dig in the ribs, but she’ll pull through all right, sister. Shift her.”
Pym put down ten guineas as evidence of solvency and good faith, and they carried Joanna Bowman to her private room.