The Best of Gerald Kersh (6 page)

This operates, in a way; the only drawback is that somebody must pay….

It was of this that I was thinking when I went
downstairs
. My uncle was lying on his back, with his knees drawn up. His face was blue with pain, but still he fought. He said, gloatingly:
‘You
would have been dead three-quarters of an hour ago, I bet! It looks as if you might come into your inheritance yet, you worm.’

‘What is the matter, Uncle?’ I asked.

He said: ‘I don’t know. My belly is hard as a
pumpkin
, and hurts like hell…. First I go hot, and then I go cold, and when I move my head … I seem to fade away, wash away on a kind of foggy wave. It pains, Rodney, it pains!’

Then Lambert came in with a hot-water bottle. (I write down these details to convince you that almost to the last I wished my poor uncle nothing but well.)

‘This sounds like appendicitis,’ I said. ‘Take that bottle away, and make a pack of crushed ice in a towel.’

Even in his agony, my Uncle Arnold sneered: ‘Male nurse!’ You see, my eyes were weak, so that in the war I was only in the Medical Corps. He had been a
rough-riding
cavalryman, and had been shot in the thigh at Rorke’s Drift – carried the Mannlicher bullet that
disabled
him on his watch chain.

‘Call Dr Gilpin,’ I said to Lambert.

He hesitated, and said: ‘I wanted to, sir, but Sir Arnold said not to.’

Remember – all I had to do was temporise, humour my uncle in his obstinacy for three or four hours, and he would surely have been dead that day. But I said: ‘Uncle, you have an appendicitis, very likely burst; and that “fading away” in waves is a hæmorrhage. Lambert, call Dr Gilpin this instant!’

‘No damned quacks!’ my uncle groaned. ‘It’s nothing but a belly-ache. I can’t imagine why Lambert called you down, you Woman! … Lambert, don’t call Dr Gilpin, call Mr Coote – if I die where I lie, I cut this milksop off with a shilling.’

That was the nature of the man; do you know, I honoured him for it! But I rose to the occasion, and
said: ‘You may cut me off, or you may cut me on, as you please; I am getting the doctor.’ And so I did.

The old gentleman was delirious when Dr Gilpin arrived. The diagnosis was as I had foreseen – a burst appendix, with a serious internal hæmorrhage.

I went with my uncle and the doctor to the Cottage Hospital. The surgeon there said: ‘We’ll pull the old boy through, I dare say. But I’ll want somebody to stand by for a transfusion of whole blood…. How about you?’

I said: ‘My blood group is universal O.’

‘How d’you know?’

‘I found that out during the war,’ I said. ‘I was in the R.A.M.C.’

‘You’ll do,’ said the surgeon.

At this point I murdered my uncle, Sir Arnold Arnold, for the sake of my love for Mavis. For, you see, an allergy may be transmitted in a transfusion of blood. I spoke the truth when I said that my blood group was Type O, which is universally transfusible. But some devil got hold of my tongue, so that when I intended to say,
I am violently allergic to oysters, and Sir Arnold lives on them; therefore, if he receives my blood in
transfusion
now – his heart being weak, and his blood pressure high – he will almost certainly die in a fit of asthmatic coughing, or of convulsive colitis, when he celebrates the opening of the next oyster season with three dozen Colchesters next September
… I was silent.

Premeditation here! When I let them siphon the blood from my arm into the bottle for transfusion, I knew that I was poisoning my uncle as surely as if I had been putting arsenic in his tea.

But I never spoke.

He was conscious by noon, and then he said: ‘Rodney, my boy, I’m an old man, and a little testy at times. Don’t mind every word I say. Blood is thicker than water, old fellow; and you must have good blood in you. You
behaved
like a man and a gentleman, by God! … Bring your Mavis to see me. I dare say she’s a nice gel, really. Meantime, send Coote to me. I’m going to give you a thousand pounds for a wedding present.’

‘Oh, no, Uncle!’ I said, almost crying.

‘Don’t interrupt. I haven’t the strength to argue. Get Coote. I’ll leave the Cottage Hospital five thousand, I will…. Go away now. No, wait a second. Rod——’

‘Uncle?’

‘Your allowance, henceforward, is a thousand a year. You’re a good boy. Now go home.’

Mavis was waiting for me when I got home. She said: ‘Good Lord, Rod! You look like death warmed up. Your eyes are all red. Have you been crying, or something? And where were you all last night?’

‘My uncle was very ill, so I got no sleep,’ I said.

I was sick to s hear her remark: ‘If only the old fellow would pop off! We’d have fun then, wouldn’t we?’

‘Very likely,’ I said heavily.

She asked me: ‘But did the old bully come across? … He must have given you a hundred or two, at least, surely?’

Unfolding the cheque, I said: ‘He gave me a thousand pounds, and has raised my allowance to a thousand a year. Does that please you?’

It did. ‘Let’s celebrate!’ she cried. But I said that I was tired, and wanted to rest. I said nothing about the
blood transfusion – the thought of what I had done sickened me.

A little later, after she expressed a hope that my uncle might ‘pop off’ soon, we had our first quarrel. After that  we had our first delightful reconciliation, and I agreed to take her for a holiday to the Pyrenees. In this, as you will see, there was the sure hand of God.

*

Ah, but that was a holiday! We spent a delightful week in Paris, and then went south. It is a wonderful thing, to leave the station under a fine rain, and wake up under a blinding sun. Mavis had never been abroad before. As you must know, the greatest pleasure that things give their possessor is the delight he finds in sharing them with someone he loves…. There was a forest, a road almost without perspective; a certain view of blue water, white foam, and yellow sand; above all, the little peak the peasants call ‘La Dent Gâtée’; and this I loved beyond everything.

You may keep your Matterhorn, your Mont Blanc, and your Dent du Midi. Give me my Dent Gâtée. To look at, it is not much. If it were much, no doubt I should never have gone beyond the base of it. My
beloved
Dent Gâtée is a very minor mountain, from the point of view of a climber – there is nothing difficult about it – the herdsmen follow their goats over the peak, and down over the Spanish border, without thinking twice. To a true mountaineer, the Dent Gâtée is what soldiers call ‘a piece of cake’. I loved it, though. It has hidden depths. Never mind the precipices that go
rushing
a thousand feet down, buttressed like the walls of the great cathedrals; never mind the icy torrents that
spring out of the living rock and go, in
blown spray, down into the terraced valley! I like the Dent Gâtée for its silence, and for its mysterious caves.

The old cavemen lived here, scores of thousands of years ago. The great M. Casteret, I believe, began to explore the caves of the Dent Gâtée; one of his
predecessors
, in 1906, in a hole named Le Chasme Sans Fond, discovered an antediluvian carving of a buffalo, and the carefully arranged teeth of three cave bears…. There was an animal for you, if you like! From nose to tail-root, the cave bear measured ten feet, and he stood five feet at the shoulder. His haunches were considerably higher than his shoulders; so that when he reared up to attack, his forepaws must have hovered twenty feet high, armed with hooked claws ten inches long. His canine teeth were bigger than bananas. But around this creature, which was much bigger than a bull, you must wrap a pelt about three times as long and dense as that of a grizzly bear. This nightmare our ancestors fought with chipped flints lashed to the tips of wooden poles! … All this made me feel that Man is not called Man for nothing.

I tried to convey this to Mavis, but she felt the cold. She wanted to be over the mountain, and into Spain; where, she said, she proposed to hear a flamenco, learn a gipsy dance, and see a bull-fight. So we hurried up and up that tricky road until, a mile before we were to touch the mountain village called Lô, we crashed.

It was not my fault. It happened like this: Mavis was hungry and thirsty, and I was preoccupied…. In my head something kept singing:
You murdered your Uncle Arnold – Murdered your Uncle Arnold – He will die in September – You have murdered your Uncle Arnold
….
Changing into second gear, coining into low, I
encountered
a cow, and swerved. My right-hand turn, thoughtlessly twisted on, took me up a steep bank. The car turned over. It stopped rolling at the edge of the road, the rear wheels spinning over the cliff.

Mavis’s arm had gone through the windshield. I was always a coward – I had ducked – I was merely stunned.

Coming to, I ran for help. It happened that an old man was going to Lô, mounted on a mule. I made a tourniquet of my tie, thrust five hundred francs into the man’s hand, mounted Mavis on the mule, and followed her to Lô, where there was a doctor.

I trembled for her, when I saw him: he was a French doctor of the old school, who used his ear for a
stethoscope
, and did not believe in new-fangled drugs. A rugged old fellow, jack of all medical trades and master of none – but no fool. He said: ‘Madame has lost too much blood and, what with that and the shock, I order a transfusion. But you are in no condition, m’sieur, to have half a litre of blood taken out of your arteries at the moment——’

‘– No, no!’ I cried. ‘I gave blood for a transfusion only a month ago. I am not fit, doctor; not healthy.’

‘– If you will allow me to proceed?’

‘I beg your pardon, doctor.’

‘
Il
n’y
a
pas
de
quoi,
m’sieur…. As I was saying, since you are not in a condition to give blood to your wife, I have called in a woman of the village. A healthy animal, I assure you. She was wet-nurse to the Princesse de Bohemond’s child, which I had the honour
prematurely
to deliver, after the Prince’s motor-car crashed on this self-same road. The baby thrived – at eight months, mark you! We can’t do better than take a little
blood from young Solomona. They do not come much healthier than she – she is bursting with milk and blood.’

Then he introduced the woman Solomona, to whom I gave a thousand francs. She bared a powerful brown arm and giggled as the needle went home in the artery at the crook of the elbow.

A little colour came into Mavis’s cheeks as Solomona’s blood ran into her veins. It worked like magic. Her eyes opened, the lids fluttering, and she smiled.

I remember saying: ‘Now I can die,’ and after that I must have collapsed. When I was conscious again, a day and a half later, the doctor told me that I had
concussion
; for which, he said, the only remedy was ice-packs and rest.

But how could I rest until I had seen Mavis? I went into the room where she lay – and she looked even more beautiful than ever – and, taking her by the hand, begged pardon for my unskilful driving.

‘It was all the cow’s fault,’ said Mavis. ‘She wasn’t looking where she was going …’ Mavis was still a little light-headed. She rambled on, drowsily: ‘… Poor old cow. Didn’t know where she was going…. But do any of us? Couldn’t see what harm she was doing…. Can any of us? Kind of lost and frightened – her eyes looked lonely…. But aren’t we all? … I hope I won’t be too much scarred.’

I said: ‘The doctor said that there’ll be nothing that a bit of cosmetic won’t cover. You’ll be all right, my sweet.’

‘… Lucky it wasn’t my leg,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t afford that…. Even so, Abaloni always kept nattering about my not knowing what to do with my arms and
hands. Perhaps this will make me worse. Oh, Rod – don’t let it!’

‘Dearest Mavis, nothing is ever going to make you unhappy.’

‘That would be nice, Rod … I
have
made sacrifices for my Art, you know?’

I nodded, not knowing exactly what she meant. To tell you the truth (it might have been on account of my bang on the head) I was a little irritated with her now. I could not help thinking:
Uncle Arnold, in her position, by this time would have been sitting up and shouting: ‘A scratch, damme, a bloody scratch! Get some wine – red wine – that makes blood! And steak, 
bleeding
, underdone! Bustle about, you dago dogs!’
… I couldn’t banish from my mind the image of the old gentleman as he lay in the Cottage Hospital: every inch a proper man, but smiling with a kind of tenderness, and eager to give, to pay, all rancour forgotten.

I said: ‘You have made sacrifices, Mavis, no doubt. For your Art. So have I made sacrifices, for your Art!’

She laughed, in a lightly-fluttering, high-pitched way, and said: ‘Oh no! What, you? Sacrifices? Oh no! I
sacrificed
my body for my Art!’

A great cold came over me then. ‘You sacrificed your body to whom?’

‘To you, of course,’ she said.

Quite calmly, I believe, I said: ‘Very likely. But for your Art, and my love of you, Mavis, I have sacrificed my immortal soul.’

‘Don’t let’s be intense,’ said she, wearily, ‘because I don’t think I could bear it.’

A strange, unpleasant light made a sickly sunrise in
my disordered head. ‘Why, I believe you were really in love with Abaloni!’ I cried.

‘Please, Rod, let’s not go into that, now!’

And then I knew that it was the choreographer Abaloni whom Mavis had always truly loved. There surged up in me a great white hate – boiling bubble-
to-bubble
with my love for her. In circumstances such as this, a man feels at the tip of his tongue some stupendous speech … and comes out with something trite and silly.

I could only say: ‘Abaloni’s fat!’

‘You’re no oil painting,’ said she.

Before I could find words to say in reply, Mavis sat up. For the moment, I thought that she was crying, because tears were running down her cheeks, and I said: ‘Dear Mavis, forgive my inadequacies, and pardon me if I hurt you. I love you most dearly. If it will be better for you to be with Abaloni, then go. I thought you loved me. I was a fool to think so. Take half of what I have, and go to Abaloni——’