Free Fowlers End by Gerald Kersh Page B

talking like a gentleman, in places where the very policemen have to go in twos and threes. It isn’t true. Apart from the fact that ill-disposed people, looking at me, ask themselves what the other fellow must have looked like when the fight was over, and respect me on sight as a dangerous kind of walking casualty, I think they get a spiritual feel of me. Neither they nor their dogs curl a lip at me—well, hardly ever—because, my face notwithstanding, they know that I am of them, involved in them.

    We are all breakables close-packed in oneuniversal parcel.
    Apropos of dogs: I was snapped at only once, and that was when I was ill with an undulant fever. Running away from bad dreams and lonely with an ineffable loneliness, I paused in a doorway to stroke a mongrel terrier. He warned me off, snarling. The dog was right: fear and disease give out a whiff of corruption which all healthy animals shy away from. The smell of fear, like pain, is one of nature’s warning signals. Danger-Keep Off! it says. You must know yourself that, in school for instance, the least popular boy— the creep, the drip, the butt, the one who is most avoided—is the most fearful of you all. You feel that he carries with him a contamination of uneasiness. Whereas, though he may have all the vices in the world, you will follow the daredevil like a pack of hounds. No disrespect; it’s only natural....
    “I admit,” I said generously, “that I am no oil painting.”
    “Oh, you’d be surprised,” said Sam Yudenow. “The year before last I and my wife, we went for a holiday to Belgium. I got a brother-in-law in the diamond trade. So they take me to the Weirtz Museum, an’ believe me, a very nice class oil painter paints worse types than you. Don’t you worry. You got the face for the job. Rudolph Valentino wouldn’t last five minutes in Fowlers End—” He stopped abruptly and said, “Uxcuse me, what’s your name?”
    “Daniel Laverock,” I said.
    “Laverock,” said Sam Yudenow, “Laverock—isn’t that a kind of a cow?”
    “No,” I said, “that’s a maverick. A laverock is Old English for skylark.”
    Sam Yudenow said, “I’m broad-minded. I don’t care what your name is, personally. But Fowlers End ain’t Old England an’  they’re sure to call you Laventry. Why not call yourself Carlton, or something?”
    I said, “Call me what you like, so long as I get my wages. Oh yes, that reminds me—what are my wages?”
    “You could go all over London,” said Sam Yudenow, “an’ not get a ‘alf. There’s men seventy, eighty years in show biz who’d pay me for your job, an’ do my laundry an’ darn my socks an’ wash my back every Sunday morning. One o’ my managers in Luton, ‘e got less than ‘alf o’ what you’re getting, an’ ‘e used to cut my ‘air every week.... You’re not ‘andy miv a pair scissors by any chance?”
    “Not very. Seriously, how much?”
    “It’s a gentleman’s life. It’s a chance in a million. A lot o’ people I know miv university edyacations would pay a premium to learn show biz from Sam Yudenow. An’ ‘ere you are, a beginner, an’ I’m paying you wages like a prince. What more could you want?”
    “How much was it you said?”
    “I don’t know why I should, but I like you. Speak any foreign languages?”
    “French, Spanish, German.”
    “Forget ‘em. Well, seeing it’s you, Laventry, I’ll make it forty-five shillings a week. That puts you in the upper brackets rahnd ‘ere. Only don’t tell anybody ‘ow much I’m paying you—they’ll all want a rise. If Mrs. Yudenow should ask, ‘Confidentially, Mr. Carlton, ‘ow much is Sam paying you?’I want you should keep a straight face an’ take the Bible in your right and an’ say, ‘Mrs. Yudenow, I swear on this ‘ere Book that I’m not getting a penny more than thirty-seven-and-six.’ There’s a Bible in the office, only the inside’s been cut out to make a cigar box. Is your mother living?”