Nightshade and Damnations (22 page)

“Shakespeare?” he said, “Shakespeare? William Shakespeare. I met him. I met a buddy of his when I was fighting in the Netherlands, and he introduced us when we got back to London. William Shakespeare—puffy-faced man, bald on top; used to wave his hands about when he talked. He took an interest in me. We talked a whole lot together.”

“What did he say?” I asked.

Corporal Cuckoo replied: “Oh, hell, how am I to remember every god damn word? He just asked questions, the same as you do. We just talked.”

“And how did he strike you?” I asked.

Corporal Cuckoo considered, and then said, slowly: “The kind of man that counts his change and leaves a nickel tip . . . one of these days I’m going to read his books, but I’ve never had much time for reading.”

I said: “So, I take it that your only interest in Paré’s digestive has been a financial interest. You merely wanted to make money out of it. Is that so?”

“Why, sure,” said Corporal Cuckoo, “I’ve had
my
shot of the stuff.
I
’
m alright
.”

“Corporal Cuckoo, has it occurred to you that what you are after is next door to impossible?”

“How’s that?”

“Well,” I said, “your Paré’s digestive is made of egg yolk, oil of roses, turpentine, and honey. Isn’t that so?”

“Well, yes. So what? What’s impossible about that?”

I said: “You know how a chicken’s diet alters the taste of an egg, don’t you?”

“Well?”

“What a chicken eats changes not only the taste, but the color of an egg. Any chicken farmer can tell you that. Isn’t that so?”

“Well?”

“Well, what a chicken eats goes into the egg, doesn’t it—just as the fodder that you feed a cow comes out in the milk? Have you stopped to consider how many different sorts of chickens there have been in the world since the Battle of Turin in
1537
, and the varieties of chicken feed they might have pecked up in order to lay their eggs? Have you thought that the egg yolk is only one of four ingredients mixed in Ambroise Paré’s digestive. Is it possible that it has not occurred to you that this one ingredient involves permutations and combinations of several millions of other ingredients?”

Corporal Cuckoo was silent. I went on: “Then take the roses. If no two eggs are exactly alike, what about roses? You come from a wine-growing country, you say! Then you must know that the mere thickness of a wall can separate two entirely different kinds of wine—that a noble vintage may be crushed out of grapes grown less than two feet away from a vine that is good for nothing. The same applies to tobacco. Have you stopped to think of your roses? Roses are pollinated by bees, bees go from flower to flower, making them fertile. Your oil of roses, therefore, embodies an infinity of possible ingredients. Does it not?”

Corporal Cuckoo was still silent. I continued, with a kind of malicious enthusiasm. “You must reflect on these things, Corporal. Take turpentine. It comes out of trees. Even in the sixteenth century there were many known varieties of turpentine—Chian terebinthine, and what not. But above all, my dear fellow, consider honey! There are more kinds of honey in the world than have ever been categorized. Every honeycomb yields a slightly different honey. You must know that bees living in heather gather and store one kind of honey, while bees in an apple orchard give us something quite different. It is all honey, of course, but its flavor and quality is variable beyond calculation. Honey varies from hive to hive, Corporal Cuckoo. I say nothing of wild bees’ honey.”

“Well?” he said, glumly.

“Well. All this is relatively simple, Corporal, in relation to what comes next. I don’t know how many beehives there are in the world. Assume that in every hive there are—let us be moderate—one thousand bees. (There are more than that, of course, but I am trying to simplify.) You must realize that every one of these bees brings home a slightly different drop of honey. Every one of these bees may, in her travels, take honey from fifty different flowers. The honey accumulated by all the bees in the hive is mixed together. Any single cell in any honeycomb out of any hive contains scores of subtly different elements! I say nothing of the time element; honey six months old is very different from honey out of the same hive, left for ten years. From day to day, honey changes. Now taking all possible combinations of eggs, roses, turpentine and honey . . . where are you? Answer me that, Corporal Cuckoo.”

Corporal Cuckoo struggled with this for a few seconds, and then said: “I don’t get it. You think I’m nuts, don’t you?”

“I never said so,” I said, uneasily.

“No, you never
said
so. Well, listen. Don’t give me all that double talk. I’m doing you a favor. Look—”

He took out and opened his jackknife, and scrutinized his left hand, looking for an unscarred area of skin. “No!” I shouted, and gripped his knife-hand. I might have been trying to hold back the piston rod of a great locomotive. My grip and my weight were nothing to Corporal Cuckoo’s.

“—Look,” he said, calmly, and cut through the soft flesh between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand until the knife-blade stopped on the bone, and the thumb fell back until it touched the forearm. “See that?”

I saw it through a mist. The great ship seemed, suddenly, to roll and plunge. “Are you crazy?” I said, as soon as I could.

“No,” said Corporal Cuckoo. “I’m showing you I’m not, see?” He held out his mutilated hand close to my face.

“Take it away,” I said.

“Sure,” said Corporal Cuckoo. “Watch this.” He pushed the almost-severed thumb back into place, and held it down with his right hand. “It’s okay,” he said, “there’s no need to look sick. I’m showing you, see? Don’t go—sit down. I’m not kidding. I can give you a hell of a story, a fact story. I can show you Paré’s little notebook and everything. You saw what I showed you when I pulled up my shirt? You saw what I’ve got right here, on the left side?”

I said: “Yes.”

“Well, that’s where I got hit by a nine-pound cannon ball when I was on the
Mary Ambree
, fighting against the Spanish Armada—it smashed my chest so that the ribs went through my heart—and I was walking about in two weeks. And this other one on the right, under the ribs—tomorrow I’ll show you what it looks like from the back—I got that one at the Battle of Fontenoy; and there’s a hell of a good story there. A French cannon ball came down and hit a broken sword that a dead officer had dropped, and it sent that sword flying right through me, lungs and liver and all. So help me, it came out through my right shoulder blade. The other one lower down was a bit of a bombshell at the Battle of Waterloo—I was opened up like a pig—it wasn’t worth the surgeon’s while to do anything about it. But I was on my feet in six days, while men with broken legs were dying like flies. I can prove it, I tell you! And listen—I marched to Quebec with Benedict Arnold. Sit still and listen—my right leg was smashed to pulp all the way down from the hip to the ankle at Balaklava. It knitted together before the surgeon had a chance to get around to me—he couldn’t believe his eyes, he thought he was dreaming. I can tell you a hell of a story! But it’s worth dough, see? Now, this is my proposition—I’ll tell it, you write it, and we’ll split fifty-fifty, and I’ll start my farm. What d’you say?”

I heard myself saying, in a sickly, stupid voice: “Why didn’t you save some of your pay, all those years?”

Corporal Cuckoo replied, with scorn: “Why didn’t I save my pay! Because I’m what I
am
, you mug! Hell, once upon a time, if I’d kept away from cards, I could’ve bought Manhattan Island for less than what I lost to a Dutchman called Bruncker drawing ace-high for English guineas! Save my pay! If it wasn’t one thing it was another. I lay off liquor. Okay. So if it’s not liquor, it’s a woman. I lay off women. Okay. Then it’s cards or dice. I always
meant
to save my pay; but I never had it
in
me to save my goddam pay! Doctor Paré’s stuff fixed me—and when I say it fixed me, I mean, it fixed me, just like I was, and am, and always will be. See? A foot soldier, ignorant as dirt. It took me nearly a hundred years to learn to write my name, and four hundred years to get to be a corporal. How d’you like that? And it took will power, at that! Now here’s my proposition: fifty-fifty on the story. Once I get proper publicity in a magazine, I’ll be able to let the digestive out of my hands with an easy mind—see? Because nobody’d dare to try any funny business with a man with nationwide publicity. Eh?”

“No, of course not,” I said.

“Eh?”

“Sure, sure, Corporal.”

“Good,” said Corporal Cuckoo. “Now in case you think I’m kidding, take a look at this. You saw what I done?”

“I saw, Corporal.”

“Look,” he said, thrusting his left hand under my nose. It was covered with blood. His shirt-cuff was red and wet. Fascinated, I saw one thick, sluggish drop crawl out of the cloth near the buttonhole and hang, quivering, before it fell on my knee. The mark of it is in the cloth of my trousers to this day.

“See?” said Corporal Cuckoo, and he licked the place between his fingers where his knife had cut down. A pale area appeared. “Where did I cut myself?” he asked.

I shook my head: there was no wound—only a white scar. He wiped his knife on the palm of his hand—it left a red smear—and let the blade fall with a sharp click. Then he wiped his left hand on his right, rubbed both hands clean upon the backs of his trouser legs, and said, “Am I kidding?”

“Well!” I said, somewhat breathlessly. “Well . . . !”

“Oh, what the hell!” groaned Corporal Cuckoo, weary beyond words, exhausted, worn out by his endeavors to explain the inexplicable and make the incredible sound reasonable. “. . . Look. You think this is a trick? Have you got a knife?”

“Yes. Why?”

“A big knife?”

“Moderately big.”

“Okay. Cut my throat with it, and see what happens. Stick it in me wherever you like. And I’ll bet you a thousand dollars I’ll be alright inside two or three hours. . . . Go on. Man to man, it’s a bet. Or go borrow an axe if you like; hit me over the head with it.”

“Be damned if I do,” I said, shuddering.

“And that’s how it is,” said Corporal Cuckoo, in despair. “And that’s how it is every time. There they are, making fortunes out of soap and toothpaste . . . and here I am, with something in my pocket to keep you young and healthy forever—ah, go and chase yourself! I never ought to’ve drunk your rotten Scotch. This is the way it always is. You wear a beard just like I used to wear before I got a gunpowder burn in the chin at Zutphen, when Sir Philip Sidney got his; or I wouldn’t have talked to you. Oh, you dope! I could murder you, so help me I could! Go to hell!”

Corporal Cuckoo leapt to his feet and darted away so swiftly that before I found my feet he had disappeared. There was blood on the deck close to where I had been sitting—a tiny pool of blood, no larger than a coffee-saucer, broken at one edge by the imprint of a heel. About a yard and a half away I saw another heel mark in blood, considerably less noticeable. Then there was a dull smear, as if one of the bloody rubber heels had spun around and impelled its owner towards the left. “Cuckoo! Cuckoo!” I shouted. “Oh, Cuckoo! Cuckoo!”

But I never saw Corporal Cuckoo again, and I wonder where he can be. It may be that he gave me a false name. But what I heard I heard, and what I saw I saw; and I have five hundred dollars here in an envelope for the man who will put me in touch with him. Honey and oil of roses, eggs and turpentine; these involve, as I said, infinite permutations and combinations. So does any comparable mixture. Still, it might be worth investigating. Why not? Fleming got penicillin out of mildew. Only God knows the glorious mysteries of the dust, out of which come trees and bees and life in every form, from mildew to man.

I lost Corporal Cuckoo before we landed in New York on July
11
,
1945
. Somewhere in the United States, I believe, there is a man, tremendously strong in the arms, and covered with terrible scars, who has the dreadfully dangerous secret of perpetual youth and life. He appears to be about thirty-odd years of age, and has watery, greenish eyes.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gerald Kersh
was born in Teddington-on-Thames, near London, in
1911
. He left school and took on a series of jobs—salesman, baker, fish-and-chips cook, nightclub bouncer, freelance newspaper reporter—and at the same time was writing his first two novels. His career began inauspiciously with the release of his first novel,
Jews Without Jehovah
, published when Kersh was
2
3
: the book was withdrawn after only
80
copies were sold when Kersh’s relatives brought a libel suit against him and his publisher. He gained notice with his third novel,
Night and the City
(1938)
and for the next thirty years published numerous novels and short story collections, including the novel
Fowlers End
(1957)
, which some critics, including Harlan Ellison, believe to be his best.

Kersh fought in the Second World War as a member of the Coldstream Guards before being discharged in
1943
after having both his legs broken in a bombing raid. He traveled widely before moving to the United States and becoming an American citizen, because “the Welfare State and confiscatory taxation make it impossible to work over there, if you’re a writer.”

Kersh was a larger than life figure, a big, heavy-set man with piercing black eyes and a fierce black beard, which led him to describe himself proudly as “villainous-looking.” His obituary recounts some of his eccentricities, such as tearing telephone books in two, uncapping beer bottles with his fingernails, bending dimes with his teeth, and ordering strange meals, like “anchovies and figs doused in brandy” for breakfast. Kersh lived the last several years of his life in the mountain community of Cragsmoor, in New York, and died at age
57
in
1968
of cancer of the throat.