Fowlers End (13 page)

BARGAIN! BARGAIN! BARGAIN!
TINNED HERRINGS IN
MUSTARD SAUCE!
per 2 1/2d tin!

For some reason this twopence-halfpenny per tin drove me into a state of unreasoning anger. The triviality of the sum belittled the magnitude of my hunger; it mocked at my misery. “Twopenny-halfpenny” is a denigratory term, anyway: I have seen a Cockney woman sneering off all the “bitches” and “whores” her neighbor could lay her tongue to, but it took four policemen to hold her after she had been called “a tuppenny-ha’ penny creature.” What is more, the
heartiness of the salesman was getting on my nerves. He kept shouting, “Ooo, they’re delicious, mum! Ooo, they’re scrumptious! Yum-yum! Ooo, won’t yer old man give you a lovely cuddle if you bring ‘im ‘ome luscious ‘errings in descruptious mustard sauce for ‘is nice little tea! They’re degor-geous, they’re scruscious, they melt in the marf, they’re degesti-ble, all the way from ‘Olland! Tuppence-ha’ penny! Tuppence-ha’ penny!
Tuppence-ha’ penny!”
I wanted to kill that man, to tear him into little pieces. By way of a compromise, out of my great need, I decided to rob him. One of his innumerab
le tins of twopenny-halfpenny herring was balanced on the edge of the stall so that a touch might send it into the gutter. My plan was to brush it with my sleeve in passing and later, when nobody was looking, pick it up and carry it off. At present it seemed to me that the eyes of all the world were focused upon me.

The man went on, in a voice that went through and through me: “Delicious mustard sauce, mind you! Deluscious, degor-geous, degestible—it warms the cockles! Rub it on yer chest, rub it on yer feet—it cures ipsy-pipsy, pyorrhea, female ailments, lack of appetite, and the gout! Tuppence-ha’ penny, gels! tuppence-ha’ penny!”

This was rather too much. Taking careful aim with my cuff, I brushed the balanced tin of herrings. It fell right back onto the stall. Believe me, anyone who tells you that hunger sharpens the senses ought to try it and see. But now my blood was up, and I was determined to get that tin of herrings and no other; so I picked it up boldly, scrutinized it with what I believed to be an air of mild amusement mixed with a certain disdain—all this with an eye on the salesman, whose detestable patter had attracted several customers. I took the tin by one corner, between thumb and foref
inger; glancing left and right, convinced now that nobody was looking at me, I dropped it into my pocket and turned to go away—when I found myself staring at a silver-buttoned
blue tunic which seemed vast as a night full of stars, and there stood the biggest policeman I had ever seen. From the boss of his helmet to the iron heels of his immense boots, he must have measured some six feet eight, and the expression of his face was such that I lost all hope. Drowning men are supposed, in a flash of recollection, to relive their pasts. (This, by the way, is untrue; I have nearly drowned twice, and I know.) I, in a prophetic flash, suffered the agonies of the future: I saw a shambling, shamefaced man, prematurely stooped, standing in a cemetery, weeping bitte
rly, while someone said in a penetrating whisper, “That is the ex-convict, Daniel Laverock. If only he had taken the advice of his Uncle Hugh, he would not have brought his mother’s gray hairs in sorrow to the grave.”

I said to the policeman, “Which is the way to the British Museum?”

The policeman’s fist came up, clenched, from under the skirt of his tunic, and I stared at it, fascinated, for it was covered to the second joints of the fingers with black hair.

But then something remarkable happened. A girl took me by the arm and cried, in a high, clear voice, “Oh,
there
you are! Did you get the herrings?” And she slipped sixpence into my hand and pulled me toward the salesman. I looked back and caught one last glimpse of the policeman. His hairy fingers, uncurled, revealed what he had been about to let me have with that formidable fist—the price of a tin of herrings in mustard sauce, two pennies and a halfpenny. As in a dream, I took out my stolen herrings, held them up for all the world to see, and gave the sixpence to the salesman
, saying in a feverish and hysterical way, “Delectable. Try delectable.”

He said, “Well, strike me lucky, I never thought o’ that one! Does it mean good to eat? ... Oh, it do, do it? Gawd stone me for adultery!”

I said, “There is also deglutition.”

“Well, bastardize me for a row o’ pins! Take your tanner back—keep the ‘errings—’elp yourself to a few tins more.... Come on, gels, they’re delectable! They’re deglutitious! All the way from Amsterdam, and Amsterdam sight better deglutition than you’ll get in this delectable town!... ‘Elp yourself, guv.... Ooo, de—”

I picked up three more tins, making four now, and offered the whole lot together with sixpence to the girl. “You see how easy it is—four tins of herrings to the good,” I said, trying to be flippant. “Now let me show you how to crack a safe. All we need is nitroglycerine. If you have no nitroglycerine about you, dynamite will do. We’ll try it out, as we say in the Underworld—a stick of dynamite, a gas ring, and a double boiler, and I can try out the soup in any stick.” I must have been in that state of low fever when sensation really does float away, and reason is free to wander. I
went on: “Better yet—let us get hold of the metal tops of soda-water siphons and make counterfeit half crowns. But first we must find a dentist who will lend us prepared gypsum for molds. The next step, of course, is to borrow a real half crown to copy. Thus, I get a stake, and get my face lifted, so that I can go back to my trade, which is the Confidence Trick. Get it, moll? ... Everything would have been all right if my head hadn’t got caught in the potato-peeling machine when I was working in the kitchen in Pentonville.”

I expected her to burst out laughing. Instead, she said, “I suppose you know that all this leads nowhere? You know, you can’t get out of life more than you put into it. You must give this up.”

“Right-handed,” I replied, holding up my mutilated left hand and talking in a tone of exaggerated bitterness. “Oh, yeah? And what did life give me? I was the best left-handed forger in the racket until my finger was bitten off by a shark.”

You must understand that in the circles in which I had been used to moving we used to talk like that. We thought it was funny. No word was allowed to convey its proper meaning or was uttered without a certain note of irony. We went in for a kind of tonal double-talk—a manner of cowardly equivocation by expressions of face and voice. For example, we never said
love,
but
lerve;
and crime was not
crime,
but
cur-rye-um.
In any case a mock-serious look followed, and a snigger, to indicate that whatever we said, right or wrong, we didn’t mean a word of it. This is the way of the jo
ker: the way of the comic-strip rabbit that mocks the hound from the mouth of a little hole, brave in the knowledge that behind him lies a complex of devious narrow tunnels, impassable to any creature bigger than himself. He always has some way of escape in the back doubles of the preposterous.

I expected her to laugh, but she was deadly serious. She said, “Why, you poor man—you stole because you were hungry.”

Trying desperately hard to keep it up, I said, “Don’t you believe it. Just to keep my hand in. I’m in training for a bank vault-starting small with a tin of herrings.”

Then—it may have been hunger, or exhaustion, or shame, or all three—something caught me by the throat, and I choked.

She got me into a taxi in the nick of time; no sooner had the door slammed when I found myself sobbing thanks and gasping apologies, while she was stroking my head and calling me a poor fellow, and holding her handkerchief to my nose and saying, “There, there—blow!”

Pride had its fall indeed, that day.

Afew minutes passed before the dimness was out of my eyes, so that I could see her clearly. Hers was a difficult face to categorize or describe. My first impression of it was that she had admired a very different sort of face in her
childhood, and had spent a good deal of time trying to mold hers accordingly. Her expression was intended to be haughty, aloof, disinterested,
blase—the
expression of the vamp, the
femme fatale.
But it didn’t quite come off. From time to time, in her smooth pale cheeks, little dimpled imprints would appear and disappear, as if a ghostly conflict was going on there as Vanity locked horns with laughter. Her eyes, which were blue and extraordinarily large, were fixed in what she intended to be a deadly, hypnotic glare— which, however, ended up as a look of startled interest, of co
ncentrated engrossment. It was her hair that fascinated me, just then.

Now how do you describe hair? Generally, in terms of minerals and vegetables—copper, ebony, gold, chestnut, silver, carrots, bronze, corn, and what not. Her hair resembled nothing so much as that Manzanita wood which the artistic photographers used to take pictures of from every angle, with grave reference to “Art Forms in Nature.” Manzanita has since become the pride and joy of lamp designers, interior decorators, and other rabble. It has no color, but only form, suggestive of struggle against the elements. Sand-blasted, sun-struck, wind-beaten, fiber clings to writhing fiber, artful
ly tortuous, subtly stubborn. It seems to say,
Life, do what you will with me—twist me, turn me, freeze me, burn me—I know where I am going!
An inspired doodle, suggestive of something that has refused, pointblank, to live the easy way and has suffered accordingly— such is Manzanita, and that is what this girl’s hair looked like. She had tried to cut it off at the nape of her neck, but it had clenched itself into a defiant knot there, seemingly of its own stubborn will.

“What is your name?” she asked.

“Laverock,” I said.

“My name is June Whistler,” she said.

“It’s a very nice name. It’s the sort of name you feel you ought to have heard somewhere before. Perhaps I have. Are you a film star?”

She said, “No. I work in the Office of the High Commissioner for Asia. When you have had something to eat and rested a little I want you to tell me all about yourself. Every word.”

“A tall order,” I said; and indeed it was, because, apart from the silly little fiasco of Laverock Libraries, Ltd., I had not a single interesting truth to tell about myself. And if you have a face like mine, you simply cannot say to a confiding female, “I got this way falling out of a window into a cucumber frame and afterward riding a tricycle down the stairs through a door.” It would disappoint her. She would prefer not to believe you. It’s frightening when you pause to think to what an extent you live up to people and are being lived up to in your turn, how generally you fak
e yourself in blind obedience to somebody else’s fantasy. The time comes when you wonder if you really are yourself and not a character that has been read about or seen in a movie. Whoever you are, you are the victim of somebody else’s enchantment, doomed, like the people in the fairy tales, to go through life in an alien form—to hop as a toad, bray as an ass, or fly as a swan—until the kiss of true love honestly reciprocated releases you from your bondage and lets you be yourself.

“Yes,” said June Whistler, “I can see that you must have lived a very full life—wild, terrible—” “But—”

“No, you mustn’t say a word until you’ve had a good meal.”

She lived in one of those quiet crescents near Primrose Hill. “It’s quite near the zoo,” she said, as we got out of the taxi. “I can hear the lions at feeding time.
Sometimes they roar in the morning, too. They were roaring this morning, you know.”

“They were shooting a horse,” I said. “Are you aware that a lion eats twenty-eight pounds of horse meat at a sitting?”

Luckily, she lived on the ground floor; I do not think I could have managed the stairs, I felt so weak.

“Make yourself comfortable,” she said, “while I prepare some food. I’ll make you a pork chop and some tea. Would you like some herrings first?”

“No,” I said, “no, thanks—no herrings, not on any account, if you don’t mind. I’ll never touch another herring again as long as I live, I swear!”

And this vow I have kept. Since that notable day I have grown hardened to many gruesome sights and horrid odors, and have eaten food that would turn the stomach of a shark. But I cannot look upon a herring without nausea— especially a tinned herring in mustard sauce; and I cannot bring myself to pronounce the word
delicious.

June Whistler’s flat consisted of two small rooms, a kitchenette, and a bathroom. She was childishly proud of the fact that it was self-contained. She explained: “I
must
be alone. I must come and go as I please. If I want to bring men in I
must
be free to bring men in. I am answerable to nobody. My furniture
is
all my own, too. I hate the thought of using other people’s furniture, don’t you? I must feel free to put a cup or a glass down wherever I like, without wondering if I’ll make a mark. And if you smoke I want you, please, to feel that you can drop your ashes wherever you like. I
want you to feel absolutely at home.”

Bloated with underdone pork chops—she told me that they were more nutritious that way—I was smoking one of her cigarettes and instinctively looking for an ash tray. I am punctilious in matters of tidiness and will go to
extraordinary lengths to avoid making a mess of any sort. “I have a conscience about this kind of thing,” I said, finding a little Japanese saucer. “It’s antisocial to make extra work for your host—it robs him of his leisure, it robs him of his comfort.” Whereupon, with my emphatic gesture, the long ash which I had been carefully balancing on the end of my cigarette fell onto the arm of the stuffed chair.

But she did not notice; she was gazing at me in her fascinated way, holding her cigarette in the center of her ardent little mouth and smoking it in short hard puffs, like someone who is determined at all costs to acquire the habit for the look of the thing. “What a remarkable character you are!” she cried, holding her cigarette at arm’s length, little finger daintily cocked as she flicked ash onto her little Axminster rug. “What a remarkable mass of contradictions you must be I A hardened criminal—and yet you have a conscience about things like that. Why, I think that is absolutely fascinatin
g!”

I had forgotten that I was supposed to be a pretty desperate character, and she had been so kind to me that I couldn’t very well let her down now by confessing that I was nothing but a harmless fool; so I said, “Of course, that’s only one aspect of it. There’s another. All good burglars, murderers, et cetera, are necessarily very tidy people. Otherwise, don’t you see, they would go about leaving clues. Many a good man has gone to the gallows on account of a stray bit of cigarette ash. A fingerprint here, the stub of a certain kind of cheroot there, a triangle of cloth carelessly torn from your
trousers and left on a nail somewhere else— you’d be surprised how it all adds up. You think your shoes are clean, perhaps. But they’re not, you know. Scotland Yard would put a microscope on those shoes and tell exactly where you’ve been and at what time this past week.”

“I didn’t think of that. You must tell me everything—you must let me study you from every angle. I like
you. You give me all sorts of ideas.” She blushed very red, and added hastily, “I mean ... I don’t mean ...”