Thicker than Water

By Gerald Kersh

PART ONE

“You always were such a confounded milksop,” said my uncle. “I shall never forget that time when you came down from Cambridge, pure as a lily. I gave you a ten-pound note, and told you: ‘Here’s a tenner, Rodney—go to the West End, find some lively company; have a good time, make a man of yourself!’ And out you went, buttoned up like a blessed parson. And you were back by midnight, all flushed…. What? You’re blushing again, are you? Better watch out, Rodney. You make me think of the little train that used to run between Wittingley and Ambersham— when the driver blew the whistle, the engine lost steam, and stopped. Don’t blush; you can’t spare the blood for it. Oh, you curd, you!”

I said: “Oh, Uncle—please!”

But he had no mercy. He was in one of his savage, comic humors. He went right on, in apostrophe, talking to the crystal chandelier: “… He comes back by midnight, does this Rodney, all of a glow. I say to myself: ‘Well, now, at least this bookworm has made a bit of a fool of himself. About time! Let’s have a little vicarious pleasure…’ And I ask him to tell me how he has spent his evening—not, mark you, that he can have sowed many wild oats between tea-time and the Devil’s Dancing Hour. ‘Been dissipating, Rodney, my boy?’ I ask him. And: ‘Oh yes, Uncle Arnold!’ says this little nobody. And, as I am a living sinner, he puts down nine pounds-three-and-six, with—Lord help us!—a look of guilt, saying: ‘Here is the change!’ ”

He laughed his great, coarse laugh, and the crystals of that detestable chandelier vibrated with it, seeming to titter in sympathy. Knowing that it would be useless now to beg for mercy, I remained silent.

He continued: “Change, I ask you, change!—the chandelier sang: Change! Nine pounds-three-and-six out of a ten-pound note. And had he dissipated? ‘Oh yes, Uncle Arnold.’ … On sixteen shillings and sixpence, this fellow had had his first big night in town, by all that’s marvelous!… ‘The cost-of-living must have dropped,’ I say, ‘because when I was twenty-two, forty-odd years ago, and if my uncle had given me a tenner to blue in town, I’d have come home with an empty pocket and an unpaid bill from Gervasi in the Strand—yes, and had to borrow half a sovereign from the butler to pay the cabbie…. What in the world,’ I ask this tame mouse, ‘what in the world can a gentleman do, to have an evening in town on sixteen-and-six?’ And he tells me, does this Rodney: ‘I met my friend, Willikens, of Jesus College, and we went to a picture palace. We saw Rita Anita in Passion’s Plaything, and after the show we went to a cafe in Soho and had ham and scrambled eggs.'”

I cried: “Oh, Uncle—”

“—Oh, nephew!” he snarled, glaring at me again. “I decided, from that moment on, that you were a beastly little prig. I promised my dear sister—your unhappy mother—that I’d look after you. Poor girl! Your father, whom she went and married—bolts and bars wouldn’t hold her—against all our advice, was a blackguard and a scoundrel and a rogue and a vagabond. But at least he had the decency to go to the devil like a man, if not a gentleman. Whereas you—you whey-faced marigold—”

“—Uncle, I cannot help the color of my hair!” I said.

“You can’t help anything, you!” said he. “I wonder that you have the nerve to interrupt me. Why, you spaniel, for less than half of what I’ve said to you, I would have struck my own father in the face! My elder brother practically did so to my father for much less, and was kicked out of doors, and went and made his fortune in Africa… and I wish I’d gone with him…. Oh, you spiritless thing—I’d have thought better of you if you had knocked me down, just now, instead of whimpering: ‘Uncle, Uncle, Uncle!’ ”

And I could only say: “But, Uncle!”

“—And yet,” my uncle said, “there must be some kind of a spark of spirit in you, somewhere, or you wouldn’t have had the nerve to fall in love with this Mavis of yours. All the same, you should have got that kind of nonsense out of your system, the time I gave you that ten-pound note. ‘He who commits no follies at twenty will commit them at forty.’ Whoever said that was quite right. So here you are, infatuated, at your age—”

“—Uncle, I’m only thirty-nine!” I said—and, to save my life, I could not have stopped my voice breaking— “and it isn’t infatuation. It’s true love!”

“That would make it a thousand times worse, if it were true. Only it isn’t. It can’t be. True love, indeed—you, of all people!”

“And why not me, as well as anyone else?” I asked.

“Why not you?” he replied. “Because… you are you. True love’s for men. And what are you? A marigold, a carrot—aha, there he goes, blushing again like a tomato!— a weed, a vegetable; anything you like except a man. Love, young Rodney, takes blood and fire. All the fire in you has gone into your ridiculous hair; and all the blood in your body you need to blush with…. Infatuation, I say —don’t dare to interrupt—infatuation with a common dancing girl, who gets paid a couple of pounds a week for showing her fat legs to every Tom, Dick, or Harry who has sixpence to pay for a ticket!”

Even if I had not been choked with misery and rage, I dare say I should have held my tongue. My uncle was in one of his moods, and if I had told him that Mavis had slender and beautiful legs, he would have corrected himself into further offensiveness by saying: I beg your pardon, skinny legs. If I had argued that, say, Pavlova was also, by his definition, a “dancing girl”, and that Mavis was a serious Artiste in Ballet, he would have said, with an unpleasant leer: Oh yes, we know all about that! So was Signora Scampi, when my father set up an establishment for her in Brook Street, in 1883…. Brutal ignoramus as he was, he had a talent for turning any word to his own purpose. So I was silent, while he went on:

“Now, if you’d been anything like a Man, I’d have been the last to object to your marrying a dancer. I nearly did myself, once—wish I had—she had legs, at least, to recommend her, which is more than my barren scrub of a Lady had… and, as for morals, if any: better. At least, La Palestina was frank, which is more than could be said for our own skinny-shanked, goose-fleshed womenfolk… curse and confound them, from their droopy eyelids to their long cold feet!…

“However, let’s not waste words. Marry your dancer, and not only will I strike you out of my will, but I cut off your allowance. Now then! Decide.”

“But, Uncle!” I said. “I love Mavis, and she loves me.”

He said, with a sneer: “You are infatuated with your Mavis, and she is in love with the eight hundred pounds a year I allow you. I ask you, you radish, what else could any full-blooded woman find in you to love?”

I might have said that Mavis was not the type of ballet dancer of my uncle’s turbulent youth; that she was by no means what he, and his type, would have described as “full-blooded”, being dark and slender, petal-pale and serious. But then he would only have snarled a laugh and cursed himself, saying that it was just as he had thought all along—the girl was anaemic, unfit to breed from, and he would see himself damned before he countenanced such a blend of milk and water.

“Rodney, my boy,” he said, “I want your word, here and now. Give up any idea you might have of marrying this girl. If not, I send a note to Coote tomorrow, and that will cost you eight hundred a year while I’m alive, and my money when I’m dead. You know me, Rodney. I’m a bull-terrier when I lay hold, and my mind’s made up…. Well?”

I said: “I’ll do as you say, Uncle Arnold. Ill give her up.”

Then he struck the table a blow with his purple fist, and shouted: “I knew you would! Oh, you milksop! If you had defied me, I’d have raised your allowance to twelve hundred, and given you my blessing; and kissed your bride for you. As it is, you stick of rhubarb, your allowance is henceforward reduced to six hundred pounds a year. And let this be a lesson to you…. True love, eh? And you’d sell it for eight hundred a year!”

“Oh, but, Uncle—”I began.

“—Oh, but, Uncle! Why, do you want to know something? If I had been you, I would have confronted my old uncle with a fait accompli. I’d have said: “Uncle, I have married such-and-such a girl. Take her, or leave her! And then—I’ll tell you something—I’d have been for you one hundred per cent. Oh, you…!”

And, of course, it must be at this wrong moment that I find the courage to say: “Uncle, Mavis and I were married three months ago.”

He started to puff out his cheeks, but, remembering that his doctor had warned him to control his temper, sucked them in again. When he subsided, I had never seen a more terrifying mixture of malignancy and mirth than his face expressed. He said: “Oh, you did, did you? And you have the gall to tell me so, now?”

I protested: “But, Uncle! You just said—”

“—I just said, you worm, that if you had had the spirit to tell me so in the first place, I’d have thought better of you. But no, not you! You’ve got to sniff and fumble your wormish way, you have; until I let fall a word, and then you’re as bold as brass, you copper-headed Thing!… Oh, so! You married the girl, did you? Well, if I could half-guess that she loved you for yourself (as she might have loved me for myself) instead of for the money I provide you with, blast my eyes but I would have allowed you twenty-four hundred a year! But as it is, just because you’re such a sniveller, I cut you down to… did I say six hundred a year? Beg pardon: four hundred. Your allowance is cut in two, young Rodney. And for every time, hereafter, you whine Oh, Uncle, I cut you another fifty. Now then!”

He knew my old servile habit; he tore the protest out of me, as surely as if he had me on the rack. “Oh, Uncle!” I cried.

“Three hundred and fifty pounds a year,” he said, with satisfaction.

“You don’t do me justice,” I said. “You have always made a mockery of me, just because I have red hair and never liked to hunt or shoot!”

Talking to the chandelier, again my uncle murmured, making a burlesque of my accent: “He didn’t think it was fair for the Hunt to ride after one poor little fox… and when I winged a partridge and knocked its head against my boot, he burst into tears…. Poor boy!”

“I damned you, for a brute!” I shouted, and was appalled by the reverberation of my voice in that big old house. “A brute, a brute! Keep your dirty money! Damn you, keep it!”

His old servant, coming in with a great silver tray at that moment, stood aghast. But my uncle laughed, and said: “A show of spirit, Rodney, what? Back you go to four hundred a year… Bring in the oysters, Lambert!”

Lambert put down the tray. There were three oval silver platters, each platter indented at the periphery with twelve deep hollows. In each hollow lay a fat Colchester oyster in the deep-shell. In his ceremonious way, Lambert uncorked a bottle of Chablis, and poured a little into my Uncle Arnold’s glass. He, sniffing and mouthing the wine, grunted: “Sound!… Lambert, wine to Mr. Rodney.” Then, to me, with a sardonic twist of the mouth: “You won’t take an oyster, by any chance, will you, Rodney?”

I said: “Not for any consideration, thank you, Uncle Arnold. You know oysters disagree with me. They make me ill. No, thanks, really!”

He was at me again like a bull-terrier. “Oysters disagree with him!” he said, to the chandelier. “Disagree! As if any self-respecting oyster would condescend to agree or disagree with this grain of grit! An oyster would turn him into a seed pearl for a little girl’s bracelet…. Oh, bah! Last of the season—isn’t it, Lambert?”

Lambert said: “The last oysters of the season, Sir Arnold. This is the thirtieth of April. We’ll not have oysters again until there is an R in the month—September first, Sir Arnold, as you know.”

When Lambert had left the room, my uncle grumbled: “May—June—July—August… four months, before the oyster season opens in the autumn. And what am I to live on until then?… Chicken, I suppose…” Then he glowered at me, and said: “Oysters disagree with you, Rodney, do they? They make you ill, what?”

“Yes, Uncle,” I said. “I am what they call ‘allergic’ to shell-fish. They make me… they give me convulsions.”

“Then I’ll tell you what,” my uncle said. “Here’s three dozen oysters, the last of the season. I’m going to eat two dozen. You eat the third dozen, and I’ll give you back your eight hundred a year. What say?”

The very smell of the oysters nauseated me. I could only say: “I can’t, I won’t!”

Eating greedily, my Uncle Arnold said: “I’ll tell you what, young Rodney: for every oyster you eat, I’ll raise your allowance fifty pounds a year…. Come on, now!” And he held out, on a three-pronged fork, a fat Colchester.

“Go to the devil!” I cried, starting back, and striking the fork out of his hand.

He grinned, taking up another fork, and said: “Spirit! Bravo! Your allowance is now four hundred and fifty.”

“Oh, Uncle!”

“Four hundred,” said he, swallowing another oyster. “Oh, dear me, how we go to the dogs, poor us!… What wouldn’t I give, now, for a Saddlebag! You don’t know what that is, do you, Rodney?—”my uncle slavered most unpleasantly, in reminiscence. “You take a great, thick, tender steak, and slit it down the middle on two sides so that it opens like a pocket. Stuff it with eight or ten succulent Whitstable oysters, with their juice, and sew up the open edges. Grill, preferably over charcoal…. Oh, the very idea of it turns your stomach, doesn’t it? We used to wash it down with porter, and chase it with port, you milksop…. And all the damned quacks allow me, now, is fish and white meat. Not even salt. My blood pressure is high, they say, and my arteries hard…. I never noticed that my arteries were hard.”

Here the old man held out a gnarled left fist, bulging with blue veins. He touched one of these veins with the forefinger of the other hand, and said, quite pathetically: “Springy as a pneumatic tire. What’s hard about that?… Doctor says red meat and wine will make me drop in my tracks…. Salt, too, they deny me. And what is life without salt?… No excitement, they say. So what is left? Other people’s excitement, vicarious pleasure… and you, Rodney, deny me even that…. Ninety-eight per cent water, you vegetable! At least I can live to watch you wriggle…. An oyster would make him ill. Go to bed, Rodney, go to bed—I’m sick to the heart at the sight of you! Go away!”

He looked so lonely as he sat there, feeling the big blue veins in his clasped hands, that I said: “Oh, my dear Uncle, forgive me if I have offended you—”

“—What was that you said?”

“Oh, Uncle—”

“—I thought you would come around to that again. Three hundred and fifty a year it is now. Go to bed.”

Such was Sir Arnold Arnold, my uncle: a brutal old man, who had lived only for pleasure; a savage hedonist, whose appetites had outlived the means of gratifying them. Lusty, in spirit, as an uninhibited bon vivant of thirty, here he sat, at eighty, with half a million in the bank, and nothing to look forward to but the oyster season next September. For the fear of death was upon him. The doctors had warned him that, although he might be good for another ten years of life, if he took care of himself, a little over-indulgence in food, or wine, or emotional excitement could kill him as quickly and as surely as a bullet in the heart. Much as I hated him that evening, I was sorry for him. Going to bed, I reflected: Why, I don’t believe that even his oysters give him any great pleasure, now that he can’t spice them with pepper sauce….

I thought of his many kindnesses to me—he may have been a ruffian, but his heart was in the right place—and, although he had just ruined me, I forgave him. In a way, I loved him—even admired him; and if I ever hated him, it must have been because I envied him. Examining my inner heart now, I come to the conclusion that he was the man I should have inclined to be if Nature and Circumstances had given me half a chance.

I swear, I never really meant to kill my uncle.

* * *

… I could not sleep. I lay awake, reproaching myself, attacking myself from every angle…. There was no doubt about it, my uncle was right in his estimate of my character. I was a milksop, a weakling, a vegetable, ninety-eight per cent water. I did cut a ridiculous figure. I had made a fool of myself that very evening, with my evasions, and my confessions which were not confessions….

… But was my marriage to Mavis something to confess, like a crime?

… I felt my face growing hot in the dark; and, remembering my uncle’s constant allusions to my incurable habit of blushing, burned hotter. No one had the right, I told myself, to make game of a man because he blushes at a word. There is cruelty in that—schoolboy insensibility. You might as reasonably make mock of a man because he has one leg shorter than the other…. And as for making a joke of my red hair—why, if you condoned that kind of humor, you condoned, in effect, the persecution of negroes because they are black….

I remembered a boy who was at school with me, at Eatonstowe. His name was Ward, and he was an albino. None of the other boys bore him any grudge—yet how pitilessly they persecuted him! One day somebody sent him a message saying that his cousin had come to see him; and there was a pink-eyed white mouse in a cardboard box…. Yet he was silent. He made a pet of this mouse, kept it in his pocket. It used to run up his sleeve and sit on his shoulder. He used to take the mouse to bed with him…. One morning, poor Ward woke us all up before the bell, I remembered: he had turned over in his sleep, and smothered the mouse; and that was the first time I had ever heard that lonely boy cry… and oh, the desolate hopelessness of it, the woe, the helpless grief! It struck us silent, and afterwards we offered Ward toffee and fruit; but he would never speak to us any more, and soon his guardian took him away from school…. Us, I remembered; because I—God forgive me—had been among the worst of Ward’s persecutors. Why? Because, before he had come to school, it had been I who was the butt of the form, on account of my fantastically red hair. It had been a relief to have someone else to persecute….

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 color 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 favor 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.

PART TWO

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 women could not distinguish between musquash and mink, or between mink and sable. Such women were earmarked for oblivion. But Mavis had “modeled” 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 recognizes —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…. Chinchilla and sables, perhaps, might come later. Meanwhile, she could wear nothing cheaper than mink. And wearing mink, how could she ride in a bus? Women wearing mink do not ride in buses—it is antisocial to do so—the proletariat stares. And what is a mink coat without a corsage of orchids, preferably purple?… But what girl, who respects herself, wears a suit by a lesser craftsman than Vallombroso under a mink coat? Respecting herself in a Vallombroso suit, how could she feel comfortable with something inferior to Ambergh underwear next to her skin, a Bobini haircut, and shoes by Dupuy?… The hat was another item. Nobody who was anybody wore a hat that was not made by Berzelius. And one became a Somebody by mixing with Somebodies. This was Mavis’s philosophy, and I could not disagree with it.

“I always found,” she had told me, “that when I had supper for eighteen pence at the Cafe Mauve, I never had more than eighteen pence to pay for my supper. But when I started to have supper for three-and-sixpence at the Cafe Imperial, I managed to find three-and-sixpence…”

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 it 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 temporize, humor 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 hemorrhage. 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 honored 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 hemorrhage.

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 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 Gatee”; and this I loved beyond everything.

You may keep your Matterhorn, your Mont Blanc, and your Dent du Midi. Give me my Dent Gatee. 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 Gatee 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 Gatee 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 Gatee 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 Gatee; 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 gypsy dance, and see a bull-light. So we hurried up and up that tricky road until, a mile before we were to touch the mountain village called Lo, 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, coming 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 L6, 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 L6, 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 qaoi, 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 Princess de Bohemond’s child, which I had the honor 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 give 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 color 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 unskillful 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 rancor 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—”

But she was not crying. She could not catch her breath.

I called for the doctor. He said: “It happens, occasionally. There are people, especially women, who are affected like this in the mountains by changes in atmospheric pressure. Come away, and let her rest.”

I came away with the nurse, who put me to bed with cold towels on my head. Next morning, when I went to see Mavis, she said: “I must have been sort of woozy yesterday. Rod, did I say all sorts of silly things? … I can sit up today. Let’s go home soon…. But tell me— did I talk all kinds of silliness?”

“Not a word,” I said.

“I must have had a temperature,” she said. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me, but I seem to have caught a virus, or something—”Mavis began to struggle for breath, and the sound that she made—how can I describe it?—was as if she had been caught at that fine point between breathing-in and breathing-out. She agonized, at last, in a convulsive combination of coughing and sneezing.

“The doctor says this has something to do with atmospheric pressure,” I told her. “As soon as he gives permission, I’ll take you home. I’m sorry our little holiday turned out so wretchedly.”

Mavis said: “Please, Rod, let it be soon! I can’t breathe here…. Do you very much mind not kissing me, Rod? This might be catching. Yes, that’s it—it might be catching. Do you mind awfully leaving me alone a bit? Pretty please?”

I had to say: “Look, Mavis—did you mean what you said last night about loving Abaloni?”

She became angry at this, and cried: “Oh, for heaven’s sake, do try to be civilized just for once in your life! Please leave me alone, Rod. Sort of go away, kind of, for the moment; and tomorrow, perhaps.”

So I left her, and went to see the doctor. He handed me a cablegram. It was from my uncle’s solicitor, Mr. Coote. My uncle, Sir Arnold Arnold, had died suddenly in Paris: would I, his heir and executor, return to London at my earliest convenience?

When I read this, I put my head between my hands and sat for a while rocking to and fro in deep grief. Then this grief was overlaid with black fear. Was it I who killed him? I wondered. But I reassured myself— this could not be: oysters would not be in season until the first of September. So I went back to Mavis’s bedside.

“Oh, please, Rod—”she began.

“—I must go back to England immediately,” I said. “My uncle’s dead.”

Her face was radiant as she cried: “Oh, how—terrible! Oh, I’m so—sorry!”

I could almost have killed her then. But I stooped to kiss her. I hope I shall not long remember—I am sure that I shall never forget—the quick little gesture of revulsion with which she turned away as soon as my lips touched her cheek. “Better hurry, Rod, darling,” she said: and began to weep.

“You’re crying!” I said.

“So are you,” said she.

“I loved the old man very much, I think,” I said, “and you even more, Mavis. Until soon. Good-bye.”

I arranged for transportation to the nearest airport. Before I left I sent for the woman who had given of her blood to my wife and, in genuine gratitude, put some money into her hand, and thanked her most warmly.

She burst into tears and rushed out of the room.

When I went to see Mr. Coote in his office in Staple Inn, my worst fears were confirmed. Discreetly congratulating me upon my inheritance, which, even after death duties had been paid, would still leave me rich—Coote told me the story of my uncle’s death:

“… As you no doubt know, the late Sir Arnold was of—de mortuis nil nisi bonum—an impatient, an impetuous disposition. Oh dear! In a nutshell: the oyster season being over, he resented having to live on ‘slops’— he said he’d be damned if he would, and said in Paris they served oysters all the year round. ‘And what the devil’s the matter with a fat Portuguese oyster, damn it all?’ Sir Arnold said.”

“Go on, Mr. Coote!”

“To proceed… Sir Arnold were to Paris. He went straight from the train to Fratelli’s Restaurant, ordered three dozen of the finest Portuguese oysters and half a bottle of wine. He ate the oysters, drank the wine, and collapsed in a convulsion; a sort of asthmatic convulsion, but of the most violent kind. And this, I regret to say, was too much for his poor heart…. Now, please, oh, please, you really must pull yourself together!… Dunhill! A glass of water, quick!—”For, at this, I fainted.

* * *

The Victorian novelists used to call it a “brain fever”. Now, I believe, we refer to my condition then as a “nervous breakdown”. I was put to bed and given opiates and sedatives—bromide of this, bromide of that. But always, when the world slipped away, and I slid out of it into the cool dark, I was snatched out of my black, drugged peace by fantastic nightmares.

In these, invariably, my Uncle Arnold appeared, curiously blue in the face and unpleasantly bloated, wheezing: “Give me credit for it, Rod, my boy—never dreamed you had it in you to kill your old uncle!… But you ought to have done it with a poker, or even the paper-knife, face-to-face like a man … I could have forgiven you for that, Rod. But yours was a woman’s trick, a poisoner’s trick…. I’ll lime you or that, my fine-feathered friend—I’ll give you a taste of your own medicine—I’ll give you a dose of your own poison, you woman, you!”

Then my uncle coughed himself into dissolution, and I awoke with a loud cry.

I might have lain there for a week or more; only on the third morning there came a telegram from Mavis, saying that she was arriving at Victoria Station by the boat train from Paris the following day. I got out of bed at once, and made myself presentable, and was pacing the platform a good hour before the train came in. She was more beautiful than ever. “Oh, Mavis, Mavis!” I cried, kissing her.

To my horror and astonishment, her eyes filled with tears, and her chest heaved in a fit of coughing that sounded like thin steel chains being shaken in a cardboard box. “For God’s sake go away!” she said, as soon as she could talk. “You make me ill!”

I am too tired to write more. What Mavis said is true.

Literally, I make her ill. I understand, now, the sudden violent emotion of the woman who gave Mavis her blood in that transfusion—Solomona, her name was, I think. I have inquired since, and tests have been made. Solomona is violently allergic to my kind of red hair.

Therefore Mavis, who is all I have to live for, finds that my presence is poisonous to her. So she has left me, and I am dreadfully alone.

It is impossible for her to live with me. But it is impossible for me to live without her.

I see no occasion further to prolong my existence.

With this, I end the narrative of my confession: God is just.