The Best of Gerald Kersh

by Gerald Kersh

  This, in point of fact, was perfectly true. The arthritic fingers of the King had no suppleness left in them, so that he wrote with his arm. Keep your arm stiff, grip a pen between the thumb and the first finger of your right hand, write the name Nicolas and you will see what I mean. Like this:

  I had saved this for a last surprise – God forgive me. To demonstrate the truth of what I was saying (for I felt that I was fighting for my life) I got an inked pen, put it between the fingers of the dummy, and squeezed the thumb inwards. Immediately, upon a piece of paper which I presented, the pen scratched out the royal signature, and then the fingers opened and the pen was tossed aside.

  ‘I will not tell you as much as I know,’ I said, ‘because I know that if I do, I shall be a dead man. It is useless for you to pry into the inside workings of this dummy because you will never be able to discover three very important things. Only I can tell you how the clockwork is wound. There are nine different springs, which must be tightened in their proper order. There are certain very perishable parts, and these must be constantly replaced. I warn you that you had better leave me alone.’

  I said all this out of the mad bravado of a very nervous man, you understand. Having finished, and feeling myself on the verge of hysterics, I picked up a bottle that de Kock had left on my bench, and gulped down a couple of mouthfuls of it.

  ‘I don’t suppose you know that I could make you talk,’ said Kobalt, in a voice that made me shudder.

  In reply I told him the honest truth. I said: ‘I am sure you could. But please don’t. I can’t stand pain. Oh, it is not only that,’ I added, as I saw him beginning to smile, ‘I can’t stand pain – that’s perfectly true – but when I said I shouldn’t do it if I were you, I meant to say that the things I handle are actually more delicate than feathers. You could make me talk easily – you could make me talk by threatening me only with your fist. But don’t you see? – the things I would tell you to do need a certain sort of hand, a certain kind of skill, and the training of many years. You’d never be able to do what you made me tell you to do. And I couldn’t do it myself because you would have thrown me out of gear. Honestly, Your Highness, you’d better leave me alone.’

  Kobalt looked at me steadily and coldly for a long time and then said: ‘My dear Monsieur Pommel, heaven forbid that I should argue with an expert. You’re the greatest man of your time in your profession or, for that matter, any other. Let it be exactly as you say. Let us be friends. You are a cleverer man even than I thought.’

  And so it happened, my friend, that the real King Nicolas III – God rest his soul – was secretly buried somewhere in the country, having been carried out of the Palace in a wine cask, while the dummy made by de Kock and animated by me became a Head of State. The news was given out that the old King, miraculously recovered, could walk again, with only one attendant. I was that attendant. I had to be with him, to wind him up, keep him in good repair and press the proper levers. Every day I took him down to the workshop and he sat while I went on with my work on the great Clock of Nicolas, which – as all the world must know – I completed. Another artist took up work on the moving figures where de Kock had left off. That is why experts have observed certain discrepancies.

  It is fantastic, when you come to think of it: I was the real ruler of that country. I was the hand, the voice, the presence and the personality of His Majesty, King Nicolas III! Kobalt continued to be a man of power. When he, in conjunction with the Minister of the Interior, put forward the Monopol Bill that included clauses involving the oppression and persecution of Jews, I caused King Nicolas to run a wet pen across the document. He tossed away the pen with a groan and an oath, without signing. After that, the whole world marvelled at the renewed vigour of this aged man.

  At about this time, my dear Minna came into the story. I hate to say it, but old King Nicolas – like the aged King David in the scriptures – used to keep himself warm at night through the proximity of young women. I provided a young woman. His Majesty had always loved women of a certain shape with red hair. He said that their very presence kept him alive. It was necessary for me to have someone whom I could take into my confidence, because my nerves were giving way. Remember, all this went on for several years. My dear Minna kept company at night with the wax image of Nicolas III. I taught her how to work the levers that made it move, and cut for her a copy of the big key – it had a handle like a corkscrew – that went into the little hole in the region of the left kidney and wound him up. From the beginning there was a deep sympathy between us … was there not, Minna, my little love?

  It was Minna, in fact, who made a nobleman of me. She said: ‘Why should you not call yourself by the same title as others do?’ She was right. I was a foreigner, and not well born. People were talking. It was impossible for me to discuss things with the gentry as man-to-man. I procured a Patent of Nobility and, over the signature of His Majesty, became the Count de Pommel.

  Meanwhile, I believe, I was instrumental in bringing about more reforms. We taxed the big landowners, we built big blocks of flats for workmen, we sent an expedition to observe weather conditions; we brought engineers from Scotland to improve the tramway system and installed electric light, and we did a great deal to establish the paper industry. We cultivated tobacco in the south and were beginning to draw revenue from exports. I had always wondered why the whole world had not heard of Aka, the smoked roe of a fish that lived only in one of our lakes. Aka is delicious. We made a monopoly of it, salted it, bottled it and sold it back to our own country and to the world.

  If all had been well, I might have made an earthly paradise. But it was too good to last. All the intrigues of Kobalt, all the agitation of the Liberal-Democrats could not hurt us. The monarchy had never been stronger. No, it was the will of God. In the first place, the surface of de Kock’s dummy began, naturally, to show signs of wear and tear. I could have adjusted that. I could have found another waxwork artist and kept him perpetually incarcerated. I could easily have done this. It was not a matter of the first importance. A thousand times more important than the appearance of His Majesty was, in the long run, the way he behaved. How he moved, and what he said, you understand, depended on me.

  One morning I awoke out of an anxious dream and found that my hand was unsteady. Do not misunderstand me – mine was not a drunken tremor, because I never used to drink. It was anxiety, I think, that made me shake. It was extremely serious. Everything depended on my skill. I began to worry. And the more I worried, the more I trembled. I could easily, no doubt, have employed a highly skilled watchmaker, and trained him, telling him exactly what to do … keeping him in confinement, incommunicado. But I did not dare. Also my magnifying glass began to be misty, and the mist would not wipe off. To be brief, my eyes were going. A tremor and a foggy eye – that is death to a watchmaker.

  Yet again, in spite of everything, in spite of all I had done, the Liberal-Democrats had got stronger under Tancredy. Trouble was brewing. Still, I should have stayed on to the end if Minna had not been there. Thank God, she made me see reason. Dear Minna said: ‘What is all this to you, Pommel, my dear? You are a Swiss. Most of your money is in the Bank of Lausanne. You can retire and do what you like. The Great Clock of Nicolas is finished. The old King died years ago. Be sensible and get out now!’

  It seemed to me that Minna was right. I could no longer trust myself to work as I used to. I arranged for Minna and for me what the French call a coupe-fil, a ‘wire-cutter’–a diplomatic passport. Having plenty of money – my wages only, and no plunder – put away in Switzerland, I drove with Minna over the border, and so, after many years, came home.

  A little later, I learned that Kobalt had led His Majesty to address a delegation of Liberal-Democrats. Kobalt pressed the wrong levers. His Majesty sat down, cursed abominably, got up, walked twelve paces – straight into the fire – and stood, his hair and clothes blazing. As he stood, he melted. The fire took hold of the wax. The burning wax ran over the thick carpet. One wi
ng of the palace was burned down. After that, upon the slogan The King is Dead: Long Live the People, the Liberal-Democrats scrambled up to power, and then were overthrown by the Communal-Workers’ Party. The Communal-Workers were later accused of having shot King Nicolas III in a cellar. Tancredy went into exile. The last time I heard of Kobalt, he was supposed to be running a very prosperous night-club in one of the Latin-American countries … but I do not know anything about this, and I do not care to know. I cannot think of that man without a shudder.

  But, on the whole, it is a strange story in its way – No? A little out of the ordinary – Yes?

  Clock Without Hands

  SEVERAL years ago, when newspapers had space to spare for all kinds of sensational trivialities, John Jacket of the Sunday Special went to talk with a certain Mr Wainewright about the stabbing of a man named Tooth whose wife had been arrested and charged with murder. It was a commonplace, dreary case. The only extraordinary thing about it was that Martha Tooth had not killed her husband ten years earlier. The police had no difficulty in finding her. She was sitting at home, crying and wringing her hands. It was a dull affair; she was not even young, or pretty.

  But Jacket had a knack of finding strange and colourful aspects of drab, even squalid affairs. He always appproached his subjects from unconventional angles. Now he went out on the trail of Wainewright, the unassuming man who had found Tooth’s body, and who owned the house in which Tooth had lived.

  Even the Scotland Yard man who took down Wainewright’s statement had not been able to describe the appearance of the little householder. He was ‘just ordinary’, the detective said, ‘sort of like a City clerk’. He was like everybody: he was a nobody. At half-past seven every evening Wainewright went out to buy a paper and drink a glass of beer in the saloon bar of the ‘Firedrake’– always the Evening Extra: never more than one glass of beer.

  So one evening at half-past seven John Jacket went into the saloon bar of the ‘Firedrake’, and found Mr Wainewright sitting under an oval mirror that advertised Bach’s Light Lager. Jacket had to look twice before he saw the man.

  A man has a shape; a crowd has no shape and no colour. The massed faces of a hundred thousand men make one blank pallor; their clothes add up to a shadow; they have no words. This man might have been one hundred-thousandth part of the featureless whiteness, the dull greyness, and the toneless murmuring of a docile multitude. He was something less than nondescript – he was blurred, without identity, like a smudged fingerprint. His suit was of some dim shade between brown and grey. His shirt had grey-blue stripes, his tie was patterned with dots like confetti trodden into the dust, and his oddment of limp brownish moustache resembled a cigarette-butt, disintegrating shred by shred in a tea-saucer. He was holding a brand-new Anthony Eden hat on his knees, and looking at the clock.

  ‘This must be the man,’ said Jacket.

  He went to the table under the oval mirror, smiled politely, and said: ‘Mr Wainewright, I believe?’

  The little man stood up. ‘Yes. Ah, yes. My name is Wainewright.’

  ‘My name is Jacket; of the Sunday Special. How do you do?’

  They shook hands. Mr Wainewright said: ‘You’re the gentleman who writes every week!’

  ‘“Free For All”– yes, that’s my page. But what’ll you drink, Mr Wainewright?’

  ‘I hardly ever——’

  ‘Come, come,’ said Jacket. He went to the bar. Mr Wainewright blinked and said:

  ‘I take the Sunday Mail. With all due respect, of course. But I often read your efforts. You have a big following, I think?’

  ‘Enormous, Mr. Wainewright.’

  ‘And so this is the famous … the famous …’ He stared at Jacket with a watery mixture of wonder and trepidation in his weak eyes. ‘With all due respect, Mr Jacket, I don’t know what I can tell you that you don’t know already.’

  ‘Oh, to hell with the murder,’ said Jacket, easily. ‘It isn’t about that I want to talk to you, Mr Wainewright.’

  ‘Oh, not about the murder?’

  ‘A twopenny-halfpenny murder, whichever way you take it. No, I want to talk about you, Mr Wainewright.’

  ‘Me? But Scotland Yard——’

  ‘—Look. You will excuse me, won’t you? You may know the sort of things I write about, and in that case you’ll understand how this Tooth murder affair fails to interest me very much. What does it amount to, after all? A woman stabs a man.’ Jacket flapped a hand in a derogatory gesture. ‘So? So a woman stabs a man. A hackneyed business: an ill-treated wife grabs a pair of scissors and – pst! Thousands have done it before; thousands will do it again, and a good job too. If she hadn’t stabbed Tooth, somebody else would have, sooner or later. But … how shall I put it? … you, Mr Wainewright, you interest me, because you’re the …”

  Jacket paused, groping for a word, and Mr Wainewright said with a little marsh-light flicker of pride: ‘The landlord of the house in which the crime was committed, sir?’

  ‘The bystander, the onlooker, the witness. I like to get at the, the impact of things – the way people are affected by things. So let’s talk about yourself.’

  Alarmed and gratified, Mr Wainewright murmured: ‘I haven’t anything to tell about myself. There isn’t anything of interest, I mean. Tooth——’

  ‘Let’s forget Tooth. It’s an open-and-shut case, anyway.’

  ‘Er, Mr Jacket. Will they hang her, do you think?’

  ‘Martha Tooth? No, not in a thousand years.’

  ‘But surely, she’s a murderess, sir!’

  ‘They can’t prove premeditation.’

  ‘Well, Mr Jacket, I don’t know about that …’

  ‘Tell me, Mr Wainewright; do you think they ought to hang Martha Tooth?’

  ‘Well, sir, she did murder her hubby, after all …’

  ‘But how d’you feel about it? What would you say, if you were a juryman?’

  ‘The wages of sin is … ah … the penalty for murder is the, ahem, the rope, Mr Jacket!’

  ‘And tell me, as man to man – do you believe that this woman deserves to swing for Tooth?’

  ‘It’s the law, sir, isn’t it?’

  ‘Is it? They don’t hang people for crimes of passion these days.’

  At the word ‘passion’, Mr Wainewright looked away. He drank a little whisky-and-soda, and said: ‘Perhaps not, sir. She might get away with … with penal servitude for life, Mr Jacket, do you think?’

  ‘Much less than that.’

  ‘Not really?’ Mr Wainewright’s voice was wistful.

  ‘She might even be acquitted.’

  ‘Well, sir … that’s for the judge and jury to decide. But to take human life …’

  ‘Do you dislike the woman, Mr Wainewright?’

  Jacket blinked at the little man from under half-raised eyebrows.

  ‘Oh good Lord no, sir! Not at all, Mr Jacket: I don’t even know her. I only saw her for an instant.’

  ‘Good-looking?’

  ‘Good-looking, Mr Jacket? No, no she wasn’t. A … a … charwomanish type, almost. As you might say, she was bedraggled.’

  ‘As I might say?’

  ‘Well … without offence, Mr Jacket, you are a writer, aren’t you?’

  ‘Ah. Ah, yes. Not a handsome woman, eh?’

  ‘She looked – if you’ll excuse me – as if she …. as if she’d had children, sir. And then she was flurried, and crying. Handsome? No, sir, not handsome.’

  ‘This Tooth of yours was a bit of a son of a dog, it seems to me. A pig, according to all accounts.’

  ‘Not a nice man by any means, sir. I was going to give him notice. Not my kind of tenant – not the sort of tenant I like to have in my house, sir.’

  ‘Irregular hours, I suppose: noisy, eh?’

  ‘Yes, and he … he drank, too. And worse, sir.’

  ‘Women?’

  Mr Wainewright nodded, embarrassed. ‘Yes. Women all the time.’

  ‘That calls for a little drink,’ said Jac
ket.

  He brought fresh drinks. ‘Oh no!’ cried Mr Wainewright. ‘Not for me: I couldn’t, thanks all the same.’

  ‘Drink it up,’ said Jacket, ‘all up, like a good boy.’

  The little man raised his glass.

  ‘Your good health, Mr Jacket. Yes, he was not a nice class of man by any means. All the girls seemed to run after him, though: I never could make out why they did. He was what you might call charming, sir – lively, always joking. But well; he was a man of about my own age – forty-six, at least – and I never could understand what they could see in Tooth.’

  He swallowed his whisky like medicine, holding his breath in order not to taste it.

  Jacket said: ‘Judging by his photo, I should say he was no oil-painting. A great big slob, I should have said – loud-mouthed, back-slapping, crooked.’

  ‘He was a big, powerful man, of course,’ said Mr Wainewright.

  ‘Commercial traveller, I believe?’ said Jacket.