Gerald Kersh - The Best of Gerald Kersh

Then I remembered Fatty Onslow, who had been the worst bully of the lot – a monstrously fat boy who, having been mercilessly teased for three terms, suddenly developed a giant’s strength, which he tyrannously used like a giant. I had thought I should never forgive the things he did to me…. Yet, when I ran into him fifteen years later, in Pall Mall, he was as quiet and gentle a fellow as you ever met … and died, as I wished I might die, heroically, in the North Sea. ‘Stand by to ram!’ he roared, bleeding to death – and, with his destroyer, rammed and sank a German cruiser.

Such, again, was my Uncle Arnold, I thought. Only there was, perhaps, too much of the fourth-form bully left in him – that was all. I blamed myself for letting him treat me so. There was, I reasoned, never a man on earth who would not respect another, however puny, who was devoid of fear … and I was rotten with fear, eaten up with it!

In this respect, only Mavis understood me, because she was sensitive, too. It was she who made it clear to me that I was not really a coward; only sensitive. She loved the colour of my hair, she said, because it reminded her of something out of Dubinushki’s setting for the Valse des Fleurs …. My heart ached then as I thought of Mavis.

She had had a hard life, poor girl. Almost literally, she had danced herself out of nowhere——

– Hey, wait a minute! I said to myself, trying to reason with myself – what do you mean, out of nowhere? She is still nowhere. But she relies upon you to help her dance her way somewhere.

Mavis depended upon me so absolutely. She had such faith in me, and relied so utterly upon my given word – and I had sworn to see her through her career…. It is generally an excellent thing to have a woman pin all her faith and hope on you … but it may be sometimes a very bad thing. It takes a broad back to bear the weight of a woman’s trust. A woman’s unstinted faith may put a strong man’s head among the stars; on the other hand, it may put a weak man’s head into the gas oven. And I am a weak man.

Yes, I contemplated suicide that night in my uncle’s house; and I wish I had had the courage to commit it….

I had come, paying my duty-visit, with the intention of borrowing a little money – a matter of some few hundred pounds. Before I knew Mavis, I had regarded myself as quite a rich man: my uncle allowed me eight hundred pounds a year, and over and above that I had my salary, four hundred pounds a year from the High Commissioner’s office where I worked. Twenty-four pounds a week was affluence, to me. I had my little flat in Knightsbridge; my books and my gramophone records: my little self-indulgences. I could even lend a little to my friends. But after I fell in love with Mavis, somehow I could never make ends meet.

I met her at a meeting of the Little Ballet Group, in Russell Square. She performed the dance Riabouchinska used to do, with the little metal fawn … only Mavis was smaller than Riabouchinska: an animated ivory figurine, most beautiful! Mavis lived, she told me, only for The Ballet. But her health was not very good; one of her lungs was questionable – she had had a hard time of it in her early youth. Her father drank, her mother kept a little general store in a side street off the Gray’s Inn Road…. She had been sent out to work in a factory at the age of fourteen. But she wanted to dance – dancing was her life, she said, again and again.

She did that Fawn Dance in a borrowed costume, stained with someone else’s grease-paint. When I went to congratulate her, after the dance, and saw her weeping so forlornly in the little dressing-room, it was as if a hand came out of the foggy night and squeezed my heart into my throat.

Mavis had such humility…. Now, here is a joke: it was I, of all created creatures, who coaxed and persuaded her into artistic arrogance! Seeds of my own destruction? Yes, perhaps I sowed them. It was I who said to Mavis: ‘You must not wait and hope; you must insist, demand!’ I , mark you! …

She insisted. She demanded. I believe there is nothing quite so persuasive as the eloquence of a weakling who, genuinely despising himself for what he is, preaches in favour of that which he would be if he could.

I made Mavis hard. Soon my twelve hundred pounds a year was nothing. And, in talking my doctrine of Strength – Strength – Strength, I found that I had talked myself into contempt and out of existence as the man who had comforted the thin little girl when she was crying in the dressing-room.

I do not know whether Mavis had overestimated my fortune. I am sure I made my financial position pretty clear: eight hundred a year from my uncle, four hundred a year from my office. She thought herself lucky, at that time, if she drew a hundred and fifty a year, and had enough, at the end of the week, to satisfy her landlady in Bernard Street.

But when Mavis and I came to be together, the money went like water. There had to be supper parties, cocktail parties, and luncheon parties; because she had to ‘meet people’. And could she meet people in a shabby dress? Of course not. And could I do her discredit by appearing less elegantly turned out than an adagio dancer? No. I went to Savile Row for my suits, to St James’s for my shoes, and to Bond Street for my shirts. Again, could we live in three little rooms in Knightsbridge? Knightsbridge, yes; three rooms, no. We needed a big lounge for ‘people’, and impressive furniture.

I got into debt. I mortgaged myself. And, at last, when the dressmakers, and the other tradesmen, were pressing for settlement of their accounts, I had gone to my uncle to borrow five hundred pounds, and found myself with my allowance cut in two.

Mavis would have something to say about this!

I had not lied when I told my uncle that I could not live without her. She was all I had ever loved. Weary of turning over in my mind what I should say to her when I returned home, I began to consider ways and means of killing myself.

And then – at half-past three in the morning – someone knocked at my door. Lambert came into my bedroom, and said: ‘Oh, Master Rodney – Master Rodney – will you come down? Sir Arnold – I mean your uncle – is taken very bad!’

I put on dressing-gown and slippers, and followed him. As I went downstairs, I was aware of a sense of doom.

I wished my uncle dead, yes. I wished him dead, God forgive me, for his worth in money, considering the terms of his will. But I beg you to believe me – do, please, believe me – when I tell you that I loved the old gentleman very dearly, and had no intention of murdering him, as I did, that night.

YOU may imagine that, as I went downstairs – steadily, slowly, contemplatively – my thoughts were with my uncle. As a matter of fact, they were not. The date was 30 April, but the weather struck cold in the old house. I thought, first, that it might have been a good thing to put on my overcoat, over my dressing-gown; then it occurred to me how right Mavis was when she insisted that a woman had to have a fur coat. This being the case, therefore, I had bought her a fur coat.

Now there are fur coats and fur coats. Mavis had told me how a certain class of woman could not distinguish between musquash and mink, or between mink and sable. Such women were earmarked for oblivion. But Mavis had ‘modelled’ for furs, and knew what was what. She had a great deal of this kind of knowledge. Mavis knew, and wanted to be one with, the kind of woman that recognises – let us say – blue fox, blond mink, and Siberian sable. She could explain the difference between the pelts of certain rodents – for example, mole and chinchilla. The difference, generally, ran into many hundreds of pounds. Mavis made a social difference of it.