The Best of Gerald Kersh

by Gerald Kersh

  It was then, I believe, that Gargantua fell in love with Lalouette. I have seen it happen myself – in less outrageous circumstances, thank God! The strong makes itself the slave of the weak. And he saved her life. It is the tendency of Man to love that which he has risked his life to save.

  Unhappy Gargantua! Poor Horror!

  *

  Armless and legless, Lalouette was the Brain. In spite of her disability, she was the Queen of Pig Island. She was without hope and devoid of fear; so she could command, since everything was clear in her mind. And she had read many books. Lalouette said: ‘Tick and Tack; there must be water here. One of you go to the left. The other goes to the right. Look for the place where things grow greenest——’

  ‘Who d’you think you are, giving orders?’ said Tick.

  She said: ‘Oh, yes, and another thing: empty your pockets.’

  Tick had, among other things, a leather-covered loose-leafed notebook. Tack had a remarkably large-bladed knife which he carried, no doubt, to give himself confidence; but he was a fierce little man at heart. They all had money. Gargantua had a fine gold cigarette-lighter, and a few hundred sodden dollars in a sea-soaked pocket – he alone wore no grouch-bag. Lalouette had strung about her neck with her grouch-bag, a gold pencil.

  ‘We’ll need all these things,’ she said.

  ‘Who in the hell d’you think you are, giving us orders?’ said Tick.

  ‘Be quiet,’ said Gargantua.

  Lalouette continued: ‘That lighter is of no use as a lighter, because it’s full of water. But it has flint and steel! It strikes a spark. Good. Gargantua, leave it to dry.’

  ‘Yes’m.’

  ‘You two, on your way right and left, had better pick up dry driftwood – the drier the better. We can strike a spark with that lighter and make a fire. Having lit a fire we can keep it burning. It must not ever be allowed to go out. Your knife, Tack, will be useful too … You, Gargantua, will go up the beach. There is a lot of wood here from ships. So there must be iron. Wood from ships has always iron. Iron is always useful. In any case bring wood that has been cut. We will build a little house. You shall build it, Gargantua – and you too, Tick, and you also, Tack. I shall tell you how you must build it.’

  Tick began to protest: ‘Who d’you think——’

  ‘Leave the lighter so that it dries in the sun,’ said Lalouette, ‘and take care that your knife is dry and clean, Tack.’

  ‘Always,’ said Tack.

  Gargantua said: ‘Here’s my lighter; you can have it if you like – it’s solid gold. A lady gave me it in France. She said——’

  ‘You can have my notebook if you like,’ said Tick sullenly. ‘It’s solid leather, that cover. Pull that gadget down and those rings open and the pages come out.’

  ‘Please, if you will allow me, I will keep my knife,’ said Tack.

  ‘You may keep your knife,’ said Lalouette. ‘But remember that we may all need it, your knife.’

  ‘Naturally, Mademoiselle Lalouette.’

  ‘Who does she think——’ began Tick.

  ‘Shush!’ said Gargantua.

  ‘No offence, Lalouette,’ said Tick.

  ‘Go now, please. Go!’

  They went. Tick found a spring of fresh water. Tack reported the presence of wild pigs. Gargantua returned with an armful of wreckage; wood spiked with rusty nails; a massive thing like a broken mast in which was embedded an enormous iron pin.

  ‘Light the fire,’ said Lalouette. ‘You, Gargantua, make a spear of that long piece of iron. Make it sharp with stones. Then tie it tight to a stick. So you can kill pigs. You and you, Tick and Tack, go up to the rocks. I have seen birds coming down. Where there are birds there are eggs. You are light, you are dancers. Find eggs. Better still, find birds. When they sit on their nests they are reluctant to go far away from their nests. Approach calmly and quietly, lie still, and then take them quickly. Do you understand?’

  ‘Beautifully,’ said Tack.

  Tick said nothing.

  ‘Better get that fire going first of all,’ said Gargantua.

  Lalouette said: ‘True. Boats must pass and they will see the smoke. Good, light the fire.’

  ‘If I could find another bit of iron, or something heavy,’ said Gargantua, ‘I could do better than this spiky sort of thing, Miss. I dare say I could bang it out to a bit of a blade once I got the fire going good and hot.’

  ‘How?’ said Lalouette.

  ‘I was ’prentice to a blacksmith, ’m,’ said Gargantua. ‘My dad was a smith, before the motor-cars came in.’

  ‘What? You have skill then, in those great hands of yours?’

  ‘Yes’m. Not much. A bit, but not much.’

  ‘Then make your “bit of a blade”, Gargantua.’

  ‘Thank you, ’m.’

  ‘Can you make me a comb?’

  ‘Why, I dare say, yes. Yes, I should say I could make you a bit of a comb, ’m. But nothing fancy,’ said Gargantua, shutting one eye and calculating. ‘Something out of a little bit of wood, like.’

  ‘Do so, then.’

  ‘Yes, ’m. If Mr Tack doesn’t mind me using his knife.’

  ‘Could you also build a house, Gargantua?’

  ‘No, ’m, not a house; but I dare say I might put you up a bit of a shed, like. Better be near the drinking water, though. And I shouldn’t be surprised if there was all sorts of bits of string along the beach. Where there’s sea there’s fish. And don’t you worry – I’ll bring you home a nice pig, only let me get that fire going nice and bright. And as for fish,’ said Gargantua, plucking a nail out of a plank and making a hook of it between a finger and a thumb,’ ‘– sharpen that up and there you are.’

  ‘Clever!’ said Tick, with malice.

  ‘But he always was clever,’ said Tack, tonelessly, but with a bitter little smile. ‘We already know.’

  Gargantua blinked, while Lalouette said: ‘Be quiet, please, both of you.’

  Then Gargantua nodded and growled: ‘That’s right. You be quiet.’

  Tick and Tack exchanged glances and said nothing until Lalouette cried: ‘Come! To work!’ – when Tick muttered: ‘Who the hell do they think they are, giving orders?’

  ‘Come on, now, you two!’ shouted Gargantua.

  I believe it was then that the two midgets Tick and Tack began to plot and conspire against Gargantua the Horror, and I am convinced that they too in their dwarfish way were in love with Lalouette.

  They followed Lalouette’s instructions, and struck sparks out of Gargantua’s lighter to kindle powdery flakes of dry driftwood whittled with Tack’s big-bladed knife. Tick blew the smoulder into flame and the men fed the fire until it blazed red-hot, so that Gargantua, having found a thick slab and a pear-shaped lump of hard rock for his anvil and hammer, beat his iron spike into a good spearhead which he lashed to a long, strong pole. Then they had a crude but effective pike, with which Gargantua killed wild pigs.

  Porcosito is not called Pig Island without reason. It used to be overrun with swine, bred from a pedigree boar and some sows that Sir John Page sent to Mexico in 1893, in the Ponce de Leon, which was wrecked in a squall. Only the pigs swam ashore from that shipwreck. Porcosito seems to be an unlucky island.

  Gargantua hunted ruthlessly. The pigs were apathetic. The boars charged – to meet the spear. The four freaks ate well. Tick and Tack fished and caught birds, gathered eggs and crabs. Lalouette directed everything and at night, by the fire, told them stories and sang to them; recited all the poetry she could remember, and dug out of her memory all she had ever read of philosophy. I believe that they were happy then; but it makes an odd picture – the truncated beauty, the stunted dancers, and the ugliest man on earth, grouped about a flickering fire while the songs of Schubert echo from the rocks and the sea says hush … hush … on the beach. I can see the sharp, keen faces of the midgets; and the craggy forehead of the giant wrinkled in anguish as he tries to understand the inner significance of great thoughts expressed in nobl
e words. She told them stories, too, of the heroes of ancient Greece and Rome – of Regulus, who went back to Carthage to die; of the glorious dead at Thermopylæ, and of the wise and cunning Ulysses, the subtlest of the Greeks, who strove with gods and came home triumphant at last. She told them of the triumph of Ulysses over Circe, the sorceress who turned men into beasts; and how he escaped with his crew from the cave of the one-eyed giant Cyclops. He was colossal; the men were small. Ulysses drilled his sailors to move like one man, and, with a sharpened stick, blinded the giant and escaped.

  She let them comb her hair. The French dwarf Tack was skilful at this, and amusing in conversational accompaniment to the crackling of the hair and the fire. Tick hated his partner for this. Yet the gigantic hands of Gargantua were lighter on her head than the hands of Tick or Tack – almost certainly because the little men wanted to prove that they were strong, and the giant wanted to demonstrate that he was gentle.

  It was Gargantua who combed Lalouette’s beautiful bright hair, evening after evening, while Tick and Tack sat exchanging looks. No words: only looks.

  Sometimes the little men went hunting with Gargantua. Alone, neither Tick nor Tack could handle the heavy spear. But it must be remembered that they were a dancing-team, trained to move together in perfect accord. So, while Tick directed the fore-part of the shaft, Tack worked close behind him, and they put their combined, perfectly synchronised strength and agility into a dangerous leap-and-plunge. Once they killed a fat boar. This must have made them confident of their power to kill.

  This is not all guesswork. I have ground for my assumption, in what Lalouette wrote in Tick’s loose-leaf notebook, holding the gold pencil in her teeth and guiding it with her lips, before she bit the paper into a ball and pushed it with her tongue into her grouch-bag.

  It takes courage and determination to kill a wild boar with a spear. A boar is fearless, powerful, unbelievably ferocious, and armoured with hard hide and thick muscle. He is wickedly obstinate – a slashing fury, a ripping terror – two sickles on a battering-ram, animated by a will to kill, uninhibited by fear of death.

  Having killed a boar, Tick and Tack, in their pride, resolved to kill Gargantua.

  Lalouette says that she, unwittingly, gave them the idea, when she told them the story of Ulysses and Cyclops.

  But the foolish giant called Gargantua the Horror, billed as the strongest and ugliest man on earth, must have been easy to kill. He worked all day. When Lalouette’s hair was combed and her singing ceased, he went away modestly to sleep in the bushes. One night, after he had retired, Tick and Tack followed him. Gargantua always carried the spear. Lalouette listened drowsily for the comforting rumble of Gargantua’s snoring a few yards away; she loved him, in a sisterly way.

  … Ha-khaaa … kha-ha … khaaaa-huk … khaaaa …

  As she listened, smiling, the snoring stopped with a gasp. Then Tick and Tack came back carrying the spear, and in the firelight Lalouette could see that the blade of the spear was no longer clean. The redness of it was not a reflected redness.

  Thus she knew what the little men had done to Gargantua. She would have wept if she could; but there was no hand to wipe away her tears, and she was a proud woman. So she forced herself to pretend to be asleep.

  Later she wrote: I knew that this was the end. I was sorry. In this place I have felt strangely calm and free, happier than I have ever been since my dear mother used to hold me in her arms and tell me all the stories I told here; stories of gods and heroes and pygmies and giants, and of men with wings….

  But that night, looking through the lashes of her half-closed eyes, she saw Tick untying the blade of the spear. He worked for an hour before he got it loose, and then he had a sort of dirk, more than a foot long, which he concealed in a trouser-leg. Tack, she thinks, had been watching him also; for as soon as Tick closed his eyes and began to breathe evenly, he took out the knife which he had never allowed them to take away from him, and stabbed his partner through the heart.

  He carried the body out of the range of her vision, and left it where he let it fall. Lalouette never knew where.

  Next morning Tack said to her: ‘At last we are alone. You are my Queen.’

  ‘The fire?’ she said, calmly.

  ‘Ah yes. The fire. I will put wood on the fire, and then perhaps we may be alone after all this time.’

  Tack went away and Lalouette waited. He did not return. The disposition of his bones, and the scars on them, indicated that he was killed by a boar. There was no more driftwood near-by. Tack went into the trees to pick up whatever he might find. As I visualise it, he stooped to gather sticks, and looked up into the furious and bloody eyes of a great angry boar gathering itself for a charge. This must be so: there is no other way of accounting for the scattering of his shattered bones. Hence, the last thing Tack saw must have been the bristly head of a pig, a pair of curled tusks, and two little red eyes….

  *

  The last words in what may be described as Lalouette’s Journal are as follows:

  A wind is blowing. The fire is dying. God grant that my end may be soon.

  This is the history of the Queen of Pig Island, and of the bones Captain Oxford found.

  The Sympathetic Souse

  THE Carpathians have always been the rocky-breasted wet nurse of sombre and terrible fantasy. Dracula came out of these parts in which, as the peasants whisper, crossing themselves: ‘The dead ride hard.’ Hungary, and Austria, have always been breeding grounds for vampires, werewolves, witches, warlocks, together with their bedevilments and bewitchings.

  Psychoanalysis started in these parts. There are hundreds of professional psychologists (witch-doctors) from most other countries in the world who have studied under Freud, Jung, Adler, Groddeck, and the rest. Most of them go away with unblinking conviction: a species of owl stuffed with conjecture curdled into dogma. It is interesting, by the way, to observe that most of these fumblers in the dark are in a state of permanent nervous breakdown – an occupational disease you get when you try to take someone else’s soul to pieces and clean it and reassemble it. No man in the world ever emptied his heart and mind in an analyst’s office or anywhere else – only madmen try, who do not know what they are talking about; their candour is fantasy.

  Anglo-Saxons ought to leave psychology to take care of itself. They break their hearts trying to make an exact science of what – considering the infinite permutations and combinations of the human mind – can never crystallise out of mere philosophy. In the end, it all boils down to repetitive case-histories, reports, and other rubbish – sex in statistical tedium, with the spicy bits veiled in the obscurity of a dead language.

  So, in effect, said that shrewd little mental specialist whom I will call Dr Almuna, when I met him in a select scientific group at a cocktail party. He runs the Almuna Clinic – a polite, expensive kind of looney bin not far from Chicago – and specialises in dope fiends and alcoholics.

  Almuna is good company. This cheerful man who has kept clean because he has learned how to wash his hands in any kind of water – this Almuna, a kindly cynic, believes everything and nothing. There is nothing didactic about Dr Almuna: he admits that the more he knows he knows, the less he knows he knows.

  Once, in the course of a conversation he said to me, in reply to a certain question: ‘know the lobes of a brain, and have followed the convolutions of many brains, and the patterns of behaviour of many men and women. And still I cannot pretend to understand. I try, believe me! But every human brain is a separate labyrinth. He would be a lucky man who, in a lifetime, got to the heart of anybody’s brain. No, no; quite simply, I do not try to explain. I treat, and endeavour to understand. The other way lies theory. Hence, fanaticism; and so delusion …’

  On the occasion to which I have referred, when earnest professional men made a group and discussed cases, Dr Almuna was there, cocking his head like a parrot; one eye shut; avidly attentive. Some practitioner whose name I forget was talking of a case of ‘sympathe
tic pains’. He had investigated and thoroughly authenticated the case of a girl who, at three o’clock in the morning of 7 January 1944 uttered a piercing shriek and cried: ‘I’m shot!’ She pointed to a spot under the collarbone. There, mysteriously, had appeared a small blue dot, exquisitely painful to the touch. It transpired that exactly at that moment her brother, who was serving overseas, had been struck by a bullet in that very place.

  Dr Almuna nodded, and said: ‘Oh, indeed, yes. Such cases are not without precedent, Doctor. But I think I can tell of an even more extraordinary instance of physical sympathy between two brothers …’

  Smiling over his cigar, he went on:

  *

  These two brothers, let us call them John and William, they came to me at my clinic in Vienna, in the spring of 1924, before Mr Hitler made it imperative that I leave for foreign parts – even Chicago!

  John came with his brother William. It was a plain case, open and shut, of dipsomania. Aha, but not so plain! Because there was such a sympathy between these brothers, William and John, that the weakness of the one affected the other.

  William drank at least two bottles of brandy every day. John was a teetotaller – the very odour of alcohol was revolting to him. William smoked fifteen strong cigars a day. John detested the smell of tobacco smoke – it made him sick.