Cruelty

by Roald Dahl

  The doctor bent down and pulled the sheet up a little higher over the patient’s chest. ‘You have nothing to worry about,’ he said gently. ‘This is a perfectly normal baby.’

  ‘That’s exactly what they told me about the others. But I lost them all, Doctor. In the last eighteen months I have lost all three of my children, so you mustn’t blame me for being anxious.’

  ‘Three?’

  ‘This is my fourth … in four years.’

  The doctor shifted his feet uneasily on the bare floor.

  ‘I don’t think you know what it means, Doctor, to lose them all, all three of them, slowly, separately, one by one. I keep seeing them. I can see Gustav’s face now as clearly as if he were lying here beside me in the bed. Gustav was a lovely boy, Doctor. But he was always ill. It is terrible when they are always ill and there is nothing you can do to help them.’

  ‘I know.’

  The woman opened her eyes, stared up at the doctor for a few seconds, then closed them again.

  ‘My little girl was called Ida. She died a few days before Christmas. That is only four months ago. I just wish you could have seen Ida, Doctor.’

  ‘You have a new one now.’

  ‘But Ida was so beautiful.’

  ‘Yes,’ the doctor said. ‘I know.’

  ‘How can you know?’ she cried.

  ‘I am sure that she was a lovely child. But this new one is also like that.’ The doctor turned away from the bed and walked over to the window and stood there looking out. It was a wet grey April afternoon, and across the street he could see the red roofs of the houses and the huge raindrops splashing on the tiles.

  ‘Ida was two years old, Doctor … and she was so beautiful I was never able to take my eyes off her from the time I dressed her in the morning until she was safe in bed again at night. I used to live in holy terror of something happening to that child. Gustav had gone and my little Otto had also gone and she was all I had left. Sometimes I used to get up in the night and creep over to the cradle and put my ear close to her mouth just to make sure that she was breathing.’

  ‘Try to rest,’ the doctor said, going back to the bed. ‘Please try to rest.’ The woman’s face was white and bloodless, and there was a slight bluish-grey tinge around the nostrils and the mouth. A few strands of damp hair hung down over her forehead, sticking to the skin.

  ‘When she died … I was already pregnant again when that happened, Doctor. This new one was a good four months on its way when Ida died. “I don’t want it!” I shouted after the funeral. “I won’t have it! I have buried enough children!” And my husband … he was strolling among the guests with a big glass of beer in his hand … he turned around quickly and said, “I have news for you, Klara, I have good news.” Can you imagine that, Doctor? We have just buried our third child and he stands there with a glass of beer in his hand and tells me that he has good news. “Today I have been posted to Braunau,” he says, “so you can start packing at once. This will be a new start for you, Klara,” he says. “It will be a new place and you can have a new doctor …” ’

  ‘Please don’t talk any more.’

  ‘You are the new doctor, aren’t you, Doctor?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And here we are in Braunau.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I am frightened, Doctor.’

  ‘Try not to be frightened.’

  ‘What chance can the fourth one have now?’

  ‘You must stop thinking like that.’

  ‘I can’t help it. I am certain there is something inherited that causes my children to die in this way. There must be.’

  ‘That is nonsense.’

  ‘Do you know what my husband said to me when Otto was born, Doctor? He came into the room and he looked into the cradle where Otto was lying and he said, “Why do all my children have to be so small and weak?” ’

  ‘I am sure he didn’t say that.’

  ‘He put his head right into Otto’s cradle as though he were examining a tiny insect and he said, “All I am saying is why can’t they be better specimens? That’s all I am saying.” And three days after that, Otto was dead. We baptized him quickly on the third day and he died the same evening. And then Gustav died. And then Ida died. All of them died, Doctor … and suddenly the whole house was empty …’

  ‘Don’t think about it now.’

  ‘Is this one so very small?’

  ‘He is a normal child.’

  ‘But small?’

  ‘He is a little small, perhaps. But the small ones are often a lot tougher than the big ones. Just imagine, Frau Hitler, this time next year he will be almost learning how to walk. Isn’t that a lovely thought?’

  She didn’t answer this.

  ‘And two years from now he will probably be talking his head off and driving you crazy with his chatter. Have you settled on a name for him yet?’

  ‘A name?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m not sure. I think my husband said that if it was a boy we were going to call him Adolfus.’

  ‘That means he would be called Adolf.’

  ‘Yes. My husband likes Adolf because it has a certain similarity to Alois. My husband is called Alois.’

  ‘Excellent.’

  ‘Oh no!’ she cried, starting up suddenly from the pillow. ‘That’s the same question they asked me when Otto was born! It means he is going to die! You are going to baptize him at once!’

  ‘Now, now,’ the doctor said, taking her gently by the shoulders. ‘You are quite wrong. I promise you you are wrong. I was simply being an inquisitive old man, that is all. I love talking about names. I think Adolfus is a particularly fine name. It is one of my favourites. And look – here he comes now.’

  The innkeeper’s wife, carrying the baby high up on her enormous bosom, came sailing across the room towards the bed. ‘Here is the little beauty!’ she cried, beaming. ‘Would you like to hold him, my dear? Shall I put him beside you?’

  ‘Is he well wrapped?’ the doctor asked. ‘It is extremely cold in here.’

  ‘Certainly he is well wrapped.’

  The baby was tightly swaddled in a white woollen shawl, and only the tiny pink head protruded. The innkeeper’s wife placed him gently on the bed beside the mother. ‘There you are,’ she said. ‘Now you can lie there and look at him to your heart’s content.’

  ‘I think you will like him,’ the doctor said, smiling. ‘He is a fine little baby.’

  ‘He has the most lovely hands!’ the innkeeper’s wife claimed. ‘Such long delicate fingers!’

  The mother didn’t move. She didn’t even turn her head to look.

  ‘Go on!’ cried the innkeeper’s wife. ‘He won’t bite you!’

  ‘I am frightened to look. I don’t dare to believe that I have another baby and that he is all right.’

  ‘Don’t be so stupid.’

  Slowly, the mother turned her head and looked at the small, incredibly serene face that lay on the pillow beside her.

  ‘Is this my baby?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Oh … oh … but he is beautiful.’

  The doctor turned away and went over to the table and began putting his things into his bag. The mother lay on the bed gazing at the child and smiling and touching him and making little noises of pleasure. ‘Hello, Adolfus,’ she whispered. ‘Hello, my little Adolf …’

  ‘Ssshh!’ said the innkeeper’s wife. ‘Listen! I think your husband is coming.’

  The doctor walked over to the door and opened it and looked out into the corridor.

  ‘Herr Hitler?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Come in, please.’

  A small man in a dark-green uniform stepped softly into the room and looked around him.

  ‘Congratulations,’ the doctor said. ‘You have a son.’

  The man had a pair of enormous whiskers meticulously groomed after the manner of the Emperor Franz Josef, and he smelled strongly of beer. ‘A s
on?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘He is fine. So is your wife.’

  ‘Good.’ The father turned and walked with a curious little prancing stride over to the bed where his wife was lying. ‘Well, Klara,’ he said, smiling through his whiskers. ‘How did it go?’ He bent down to take a look at the baby. Then he bent lower. In a series of quick jerky movements, he bent lower and lower until his face was only about twelve inches from the baby’s head. The wife lay sideways on the pillow, staring up at him with a kind of supplicating look.

  ‘He has the most marvellous pair of lungs,’ the innkeeper’s wife announced. ‘You should have heard him screaming just after he came into this world.’

  ‘But my God, Klara …’

  ‘What is it, dear?’

  ‘This one is even smaller than Otto was!’

  The doctor took a couple of quick paces forward. ‘There is nothing wrong with that child,’ he said.

  Slowly, the husband straightened up and turned away from the bed and looked at the doctor. He seemed bewildered and stricken. ‘It’s no good lying, Doctor,’ he said. ‘I know what it means. It’s going to be the same all over again.’

  ‘Now you listen to me,’ the doctor said.

  ‘But do you know what happened to the others, Doctor?’

  ‘You must forget about the others, Herr Hitler. Give this one a chance.’

  ‘But so small and weak!’

  ‘My dear sir, he has only just been born.’

  ‘Even so …’

  ‘What are you trying to do?’ cried the innkeeper’s wife. ‘Talk him into his grave?’

  ‘That’s enough!’ the doctor said sharply.

  The mother was weeping now. Great sobs were shaking her body.

  The doctor walked over to the husband and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Be good to her,’ he whispered. ‘Please. It is very important.’ Then he squeezed the husband’s shoulder hard and began pushing him forward surreptitiously to the edge of the bed. The husband hesitated. The doctor squeezed harder, signalling to him urgently through fingers and thumb. At last, reluctantly, the husband bent down and kissed his wife lightly on the cheek.

  ‘All right, Klara,’ he said. ‘Now stop crying.’

  ‘I have prayed so hard that he will live, Alois.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Every day for months I have gone to the church and begged on my knees that this one will be allowed to live.’

  ‘Yes, Klara, I know.’

  ‘Three dead children is all that I can stand, don’t you realize that?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘He must live, Alois. He must, he must … Oh God, be merciful unto him now …’

  Claud’s Dog

  First published in Someone Like You (1953)

  Mr Feasey

  We were both up early when the big day came.

  I wandered into the kitchen for a shave, but Claud got dressed right away and went outside to arrange about the straw. The kitchen was a front room and through the window I could see the sun just coming up behind the line of trees on top of the ridge the other side of the valley.

  Each time Claud came past the window with an armload of straw I noticed over the rim of the mirror the intent, breathless expression on his face, the great round bullet-head thrusting forward and the forehead wrinkled into deep corrugations right up to the hairline. I’d only seen this look on him once before and that was the evening he’d asked Clarice to marry him. Today he was so excited he even walked funny, treading softly as though the concrete around the filling-station were a shade too hot for the soles of his feet; and he kept packing more and more straw into the back of the van to make it comfortable for Jackie.

  Then he came into the kitchen to get breakfast, and I watched him put the pot of soup on the stove and begin stirring it. He had a long metal spoon and he kept on stirring and stirring all the time it was coming to the boil, and about every half-minute he leaned forward and stuck his nose into that sickly-sweet steam of cooking horseflesh. Then he started putting extras into it – three peeled onions, a few young carrots, a cupful of stinging-nettle tops, a teaspoon of Valentine’s Meat Juice, twelve drops of cod-liver oil – and everything he touched was handled very gently with the ends of his big fat fingers as though it might have been a little fragment of Venetian glass. He took some minced horsemeat from the icebox, measured one handful into Jackie’s bowl, three into the other, and when the soup was ready he shared it out between the two, pouring it over the meat.

  It was the same ceremony I’d seen performed each morning for the past five months, but never with such intense and breathless concentration as this. There was no talk, not even a glance my way, and when he turned and went out again to fetch the dogs, even the back of his neck and the shoulders seemed to be whispering. ‘Oh Jesus, don’t let anything go wrong, and especially don’t let me do anything wrong today.’

  I heard him talking softly to the dogs in the pen as he put the leashes on them, and when he brought them around into the kitchen, they came in prancing and pulling to get at the breakfast, treading up and down with their front feet and waving their enormous tails from side to side, like whips.

  ‘All right,’ Claud said, speaking at last. ‘Which is it?’

  Most mornings he’d offer to bet me a pack of cigarettes, but there were bigger things at stake today and I knew all he wanted for the moment was a little extra reassurance.

  He watched me as I walked once around the two beautiful, identical, tall, velvety-black dogs, and he moved aside, holding the leashes at arm’s length to give me a better view.

  ‘Jackie!’ I said, trying the old trick that never worked. ‘Hey, Jackie!’ Two identical heads with identical expressions flicked around to look at me, four bright, identical, deep-yellow eyes stared into mine. There’d been a time when I fancied the eyes of one were slightly darker yellow than those of the other. There’d also been a time when I thought I could recognize Jackie because of a deeper brisket and a shade more muscle on the hindquarters. But it wasn’t so.

  ‘Come on,’ Claud said. He was hoping that today of all days I would make a bad guess.

  ‘This one,’ I said. ‘This is Jackie.’

  ‘Which?’

  ‘This one on the left.’

  ‘There!’ he cried, his whole face suddenly beaming. ‘You’re wrong again!’

  ‘I don’t think I’m wrong.’

  ‘You’re about as wrong as you could possibly be. And now listen, Gordon, and I’ll tell you something. All these last weeks, every morning while you’ve been trying to pick him out – you know what?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve been keeping count. And the result is you haven’t been right even one half the time! You’d have done better tossing a coin!’

  What he meant was that if I (who saw them every day and side by side) couldn’t do it, why the hell should we be frightened of Mr Feasey? Claud knew Mr Feasey was famous for spotting ringers, but he knew also that it could be very difficult to tell the difference between two dogs when there wasn’t any.

  He put the bowls of food on the floor, giving Jackie the one with the least meat because he was running today. When he stood back to watch them eat, the shadow of deep concern was back again on his face and the large pale eyes were staring at Jackie with the same rapt and melting look of love that up till recently had been reserved only for Clarice.

  ‘You see, Gordon,’ he said. ‘It’s just what I’ve always told you. For the last hundred years there’s been all manner of ringers, some good and some bad, but in the whole history of dog-racing there’s never been a ringer like this.’

  ‘I hope you’re right,’ I said, and my mind began travelling back to that freezing afternoon just before Christmas, four months ago, when Claud had asked to borrow the van and had driven away in the direction of Aylesbury without saying where he was going. I had assumed he was off to see Clarice, but late in the afternoon he had returned, bri
nging with him this dog he said he’d bought off a man for thirty-five shillings.

  ‘Is he fast?’ I had said. We were standing out by the pumps and Claud was holding the dog on a leash and looking at him, and a few snowflakes were falling and settling on the dog’s back. The motor of the van was still running.

  ‘Fast!’ Claud had said. ‘He’s just about the slowest dog you ever saw in your whole life!’

  ‘Then what you buy him for?’

  ‘Well,’ he had said, the big bovine face secret and cunning, ‘it occurred to me that maybe he might possibly look a little bit like Jackie. What d’you think?’

  ‘I suppose he does a bit, now you come to mention it.’

  He had handed me the leash and I had taken the new dog inside to dry him off while Claud had gone round to the pen to fetch his beloved. And when he returned and we put the two of them together for the first time, I can remember him stepping back and saying, ‘Oh Jesus!’ and standing dead still in front of them like he was seeing a phantom. Then he became very quick and quiet. He got down on his knees and began comparing them carefully point by point, and it was almost like the room was getting warmer and warmer the way I could feel his excitement growing every second through this long silent examination in which even the toenails and the dewclaws, eighteen on each dog, were matched alongside one another for colour.

  ‘Look,’ he said at last, standing up. ‘Walk them up and down the room a few times, will you?’ And then he had stayed there for quite five or six minutes leaning against the stove with his eyes half closed and his head on one side, watching them and frowning and chewing his lips. After that, as though he didn’t believe what he had seen the first time, he had gone down again on his knees to recheck everything once more; but suddenly, in the middle of it, he had jumped up and looked at me, his face fixed and tense, with a curious whiteness around the nostrils and the eyes. ‘All right,’ he had said, a little tremor in his voice. ‘You know what? We’re home. We’re rich.’