Gerald Kersh - The Best of Gerald Kersh

‘I do not want a wife,’ said Tessier, ‘and I have no need for a toothbrush.’ He bared his toothless gums.

‘You used to have excellent teeth,’ said Ratapoil.

‘I have none left that show – I was kicked in the face by a horse.’

‘You shall have the best teeth that money can buy,’ said Ratapoil, ‘the teeth of a healthy young negress, fresh-pulled; and Dr Brossard will fit them into your jaws, so that you’ll never know the difference. Meanwhile, drink, Tessier, drink. Brandy needs no chewing.’

Tessier drank, muttering: ‘The devil take all horses, and, in particular, dapple-grey mares that show the whites of their eyes…. Believe me, Ratapoil, men, women and horses are never to be trusted when they show the whites of their eyes below the iris…. Also, beware of Roman noses, they also are signs of danger in men, women, and horses…. Damn that roman-nosed dapple-grey mare from throat-latch to croup; and damn her rolling eyes!’

‘I detest horses,’ said Ratapoil. ‘But then I am an infantryman, born and bred. I’d rather trust myself to my own two legs than to the four legs of that most hysterical and cowardly of beasts, the horse. I can at least rely on these feet of mine not to bolt with me if a rabbit starts up under my nose in the moonlight; or not to kick my teeth out when I stoop to cut their toe-nails … Still, horses have their place in the world, also.’

‘You are even beginning to think like a bourgeois,’ said Tessier. ‘All the same, you are right. Every grain of sand has its assigned position in the Scheme of Things——’

‘– I should say so! Do you remember when I fought LeGrand with pistols in Egypt? A grain of sand flew into my eye just as the handkerchief dropped, so that I missed him clean; otherwise I should certainly have shot him. As it turned out, I was in the wrong; and LeGrand and I became good friends, until he was killed at Eylau. How old is a grain of sand, and how many grains of sand are there in a desert? And how long had that grain in particular been lying there, awaiting instructions to fly up and prevent an injustice? It goes to show … But what were you doing on horseback at your time of life, Tessier?’

‘Taking my place in the Scheme of Things,’ said Tessier, sombrely, ‘dust that I am.’

His pale, toothless mouth pulsed like a frog’s throat as he sucked his cigar alight at a candle. Then he went on:

… You, Ratapoil, were always a Legitimist at heart. I, au fond, was always a good Republican. But both of us loved France, first and foremost; therefore we gave of our best to Napoleon for the greater glory of France. Our health, our youth, our blood, our marrow – what we had, we gave! And after we had grown old in his service Buonaparte brushed us off, like dust from his cuffs; you for breach of discipline, me as a political suspect. Then we said, in effect: Beware of the Dust, O Emperor! The Wrath of God waits in the Dust! (only you said ‘God’, and I said ‘History’.) And we joined little anti-Napoleonist clubs.

You were in the Malet Plot; I was a member of the Brutus Club. Still, we were old comrades and helped each other. You escaped from France by the skin of your teeth, in 1812, and came here to America. I stayed, more fool me!

I still clung to some mad hope of a Republican coup. If that hope had been realised – which it could not have been, because the time was not ripe for it – I should now be a General. As events occurred, Louis XVIII came back to France when Napoleon went to Elba.

You, wisely, stayed in New Orleans. But, where was I to go? Whichever way the cat jumped, I was the mouse. At that time the Bonapartists hated me; the Legitimists hated me; the Republicans, driven underground, split into a hundred tiny sects, every one of which execrated me as a heretic, a Republican of the old-fashioned Classical School.

I got out of Paris and wandered, living from hand to mouth. For a while I was a waiter in Antwerp, and then I worked for a bookseller in England, compiling a French Grammar and Phrase-Book for Young Ladies. Then I went to Belgium, as courier and what-you-will to an Anglo-Indian gentleman. But, not long after Napoleon returned from Elba and the Infantry hailed him, again, as Emperor, my nabob paid me off and made for Flushing and the sea in a light carriage, leaving me with a trunkful of soiled linen, and one of his horses – a dapple-grey mare named Cocotte.

She had cast a shoe on that appalling stretch of road between Marchienne and Fontaine l’Evêque, by the River Sambre: a most desolate and dreadful place, a brooding brown plain under a sky such as must have hung over Sodom before the fire fell from Heaven. Only, in this case, the heavens were full of water, but none the less black for that. It was a wet spring, that spring of 1815, and nowhere wetter or more sombre than at Marchienne, where the Sambre runs from above Landres to join the Meuse at Namur.

We had put up at a questionable kind of inn. Originally, it had been named ‘L’Aiglon’, the Imperial Eagle. As soon as Napoleon was deposed, the landlord had painted out his sign, leaving it blank. Later, he had daubed on a Fleur-de-Lys. When we arrived, he was trying to smear back the Eagle: the news of the Emperor’s return from Elba had already broken.

‘If we scraped off a few strata of paint,’ I said to him, ‘no doubt we should come to the Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité .’

He said: ‘I am only a poor inn-keeper, I am a neutral – I move with the times.’

This inn-keeper’s name was Morkens, and he was a boor. He had some arrangement with the local blacksmith: if a traveller lost a tyre, a horseshoe, or the merest lynch-pin, the blacksmith would detain him, so that he was compelled to stay with Morkens. Morkens charged the traveller treble, and the blacksmith charged him quintuple; each paid the other commission.

We paused at this inn (call it what you will), intending to stop for two hours. Two days later, the mare was still unshod. ‘Is it my fault?’ whines this execrable Morkens. ‘If milord is in a hurry, I can sell him a horse——’

‘Do so,’ says my master; and Morkens sells him an abominable screw for the price of a thoroughbred, swearing that he is taking the bread out of his children’s mouths.

‘I’ll pay!’ cries my nabob, dashing down golden guineas. Then, to me: ‘Here’s your money, my good man. Can’t take you with me. Travelling light – can’t spare weight. Here’s another ten guineas for you.’

‘Your trunk, milord? The mare?’ I asked.

‘Oh, damn the trunk and confound the damned mare! Keep ’em! I’m away!’ cries he.

And off he went, bumping over the most dismal and treacherous road in the world, leaving me standing under an equivocal sign that creaked outside the world’s worst inn, rubbing elbows with the meanest rogue in muddy Flanders: Morkens.

The chaise was not out of sight when this Morkens turned to me, and said: ‘The linen he left behind in that trunk is of the finest cambric——’

‘– How do you know?’ I asked.

‘Oh,’ said Morkens, ‘I gathered as much from the quality of the stuff your master had on his back. Why do you ask? Would I look in his trunks?’

‘Of course not,’ I answered.

You understand; my instinct warned me to continue to play the perfect courier-cum- valet de chambre with this Morkens. I spoke primly, but at the same time gave him a sidelong glance, smiling with the right-hand corner of my mouth, while I winked with the left eye, falling impassive, again, upon the instant.

‘Now, look here,’ said he, ‘then we’ll go halves.’

‘Halves? Of what?’ I asked.

‘Oh, linen and what-not,’ said Morkens. ‘The linen, the horse …’