Free Fowlers End by Gerald Kersh

lip. It is lucky for me the beast did not get the whole hand.... But it got me out of music lessons—my unhappy mother had conceived an idea that I might make a violinist, but nothing was further from my thoughts: I didn’t know what I wanted to be, really, unless it might be an explorer.
    Which is, in a way, exactly what I turned out to be. Only it didn’t take me long to learn that you don’t need to go to Africa for savagery, to Tahiti for the exotic, or to the moon for monsters. If I want the thunder of the galaxies or the interplanetary cold, I can find them in Beethoven and Sibelius. Just any old bit of ground is vantage point enough for me. I will do my extraterrestrial traveling when my time comes, not in a chromium-plated rocket but naked, out of a good old-fashioned wooden box six feet deep in my own familiar earth. And for this I am in no hurry at all. To put it tritely: Man is my Dark Continent, and his heart is my jungle. I actually like people in general, and enjoy being in company—any kind of company.
    I get involved in it; I feel that it enriches me, generally. One reads of the love that casteth out all fear: I am inclined to believe that this kind of love is a sort of mysterious absorption of oneself in a state of sublime curiosity that lives on the frontier between conjecture and pure understanding. Fear is written in every heart, but seldom indelibly. Fear is a mere misprint which you need only recognize to correct.

    Many a night have I spent in the rooms of my old friend John Sourbreast, who has a lease in perpetuity in Albany and two thousand pounds a year taxfree all to himself. I remember those nights with pleasure. That was not a sitting room; it was a set in a scene in which, if one were not perfectly comfortable, one ruined the act. There were the richly bound old books, the black walnut Bechstein grand piano licking itself like a contented cat in the firelight, the wonderful rug that came out of the palace of Abdul the Damned, the easy chairs by the fire, and tobacco and drinks ready tohand. Over the mantelpiece a painting by Sickert of the old Quadrant, seen in wintery slush with a fog coming down; in the foreground a man in a heavy overcoat splashing in the direction of the Cafe Royal to sit on red plush, drink something hot, and play dominoes. I always liked that picture—whatever the weather, you looked at it and said to the man in the overcoat, “Good for you!” And here we used to sit, talking of Life and Death, and Good and Evil. Sourbreast didn’t seem to know which was which. In any case, he was uneasy about the whole damned lot.
    Toward about two in the morning he would try me with the Fool’s Mate of metaphysics: “Is God omnipotent?”
    To this, for the sake of argument, I would reply,
    “Yes.”
    “Is God all-powerful?”
    “Yes.”
    “But is God all good?” “Yes.”
    “Yet you acknowledge the existence of evil?”
    “Yes.”
    “Then how do you reconcile the existence of evil with the existence of an all-good and all-powerful God?”
    Then I would counter, “Sourbreast, is it a good thing to torture a horse?”
    “No!”
    “Or a dog, or a cow?”
    “Certainly not.”
    “But is it a good thing to die of diphtheria, smallpox, lockjaw, typhoid, et cetera?”
    “No, it is not a good thing.”
    “Tonight we ate steak. Was it good steak?”
    “Excellent.”
    “Yet, eating that filet, did it not occur to you that the steer was dragged in agony to the slaughterhouse, where it went down in a whole mess of blood and guts? That this steer was castrated to stay quiet and get fat for your table?”
    “Stop it!”
    “But the steak was good? It refreshed you, kept you going?”
    “Well?”
    “That’s the way people are,” I would say. “They wouldn’t touch a dead cow with a barge pole, but oh, how they love her tripes! Without the butchers you’d starve, wouldn’t you? Now tell me, is it good to be a butcher?”
    Sourbreast would sigh and say, “They are a