The Best of Gerald Kersh by Gerald Kersh Read Free Book Online Page B

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 Riabouchinskaused 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