Complete Short Stories

‘Granted, Prof. What’s your problem?’

  ‘Well, they have to choose theses for their doctorates and usually publish them. Offbeat theses: “Outbreaks of Thrush in Kansas State During the Late 19th Century”; “Walt Whitman’s Use of the Past Indefinite Tense”; “Flaws in the Maternal Genealogy of Christian Seltzer”. Or more complicated still: “Outbreaks of Indefinite Thrush in Walt Seltzer’s Kansas Genealogy”. Granted?’

  ‘Granted, Prof, for the sake of your argument,’ said Mex. ‘My poor nephew Terence did one last year on that very subject – in law school.’

  ‘And he got no pay for his job, now, did he, Mex?’

  ‘Not a cent. And nobody alive or out of the funny farm wanted to read it afterward.’

  ‘Exactly. And he’d worked like hell getting his facts together?’

  ‘He sure had.’

  ‘Well, now. About those encyclopedias getting their stuff wrong. You’ve already granted me that –’

  ‘All right, Prof,’ said the barman. ‘What the hell? It don’t hurt you none, surely? You can go back to the college library and get all the information from the real books.’

  ‘Sure, but others can’t. Why not collect the supervisors of these doctorates and make them draw lots for encyclopedia subjects – each college to get its fair share. Make the candidates mug up their facts and, if they do the job well, give them their doctorates and the honour of contributing to the Intercollegiate Encyclopedia, and everyone is happy.’

  ‘No, Prof, it just wouldn’t work,’ said the barman. ‘I’m not saying a word against Senator Benton’s encyclopedia. It’s said to be unique and marvellous – and for all I know he pays his contributors a dollar a word. But how could the universities compete with a man that big? Or with any other publishers of dictionaries and encyclopedias? There’d be a great howl against blackleg labour and robbing graduates of their copyrights. And Mex here would be out of a job. That Intercollegiate Encyclopedia wouldn’t need to be bummed around from door to door. You’d find it on sale everywhere at a quarter the price – the doctorate guys would pay for the printing, same as for their theses.’

  A pause.

  ‘To get back to those delinquents,’ said the barman doggedly. ‘Even if the unions and big business allowed the do-gooders to load up those ships and dump free food among starving aliens, suppose the no-gooders refused to play – suppose they preferred to stick around and be violent?’

  The old ex-fighter came to life. ‘Speaking out,’ he said, ‘it’s quite simple, really. Just let ’em be violent. If they have a yen for switchblade knives and loaded stockings and James Bond steel-toed shoes, just let ’em! In public, with a big crowd to watch. They’d not chicken out, those boys wouldn’t, grant me that!’

  We nodded, for the sake of the argument.

  ‘No threat to business. You could make a crazy big gladiatorial show of it, like in the movies about ancient Rome. Stage a twice-weekly gang fight; sell the TV rights for millions. Those kids would soon become high society. And, man, that show would be better to watch than any ball game. Or any fist fight – where the damage don’t show so much, but goes deeper. Grant me that!’

  We granted it.

  ‘And once you give the gladiators a good social rating, they themselves is going to clean up all the no-good amateur gang warfare, because that’s just delinquency – gives their profession a bad name. OK, so the football and baseball and boxing interests might squeal? But they’d come over in the end. Blood sports are the best draw.’

  ‘And the Churches?’ I asked.

  ‘The preachers’d have something to preach against. Maybe they’d win another martyr like who was it, long ago, rushed out into the arena and held out his arms and got clobbered. Anyhow, nowadays preachers can’t even stop wars, if big business needs a hot or cold war to jack up economy.’

  The barman said: ‘No, fella, it just wouldn’t work. There’s Federal laws against duelling, and your gladiators might lobby like hell, but they would never get them repealed – not with the whole Middle West solid against bloodshed. You can’t even stage a Spanish bullfight around here.’

  Mex said: ‘Guess not, as yet. But it’s bound to come, someday. Like the licensed sale of pornography, and a lot of other things. Because of the shorter week, and what to do with your leisure time. TV isn’t the answer, nor window-shopping isn’t, nor raising bigger families for the population explosion. Nor a hot war, neither, even if it sends the no-gooders and the do-gooders into the Armed Forces and cuts down waste and sends up the value of marginal tonnage.’

  ‘Speaking freely,’ I said, ‘it’s quite simple, really. Another round of whisky sours and we’ll soon make it work.’

  Miss Briton’s Lady-Companion

  NOT EVERY MAN remembers his mother with deep affection. A good many have had little cause to do so. Yet of this unfortunate minority some take one road, some another. Weaklings blame their moral lapses or their ill success in life on neglectful, selfish or tyrannical mothers. Others, the noble hearted, learn to bear them no rancour, to stand on their own feet and find love elsewhere. I remember being puzzled as a child by a verse in Hymns Ancient and Modern.

  Can a woman’s tender care

  Cease towards the child she bare?

  Yea, she may forgetful be –

  Yet will I remember Thee.

  The idea that any mother could possibly behave unkindly to her own child surprised me – I was one of the luckier ones.

  My respect for Winston Churchill, whom I first met in 1915 and with whom I exchanged occasional letters until the ’Forties, rose enormously after his death. I then read for the first time of the almost brutal contempt shown him, as a mentally retarded boy with a cleft palate, by his beautiful Jerome mother. And the Encyclopaedia supplied the reason both for his physical abnormality and for her unmaternal attitude. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, had died from general paralysis of the insane. Every doctor now knows what disease causes this fearful condition, and what effect it often has on the patient’s children; one can feel only the utmost sympathy with an innocent wife and mother who suffered so much. And although Winston had many faults and, when younger, often acted with great irresponsibility, who can fail to admire the strength of his resolve never to brood revengefully, always to champion the deprived and oppressed? It was not, indeed, until his middle thirties that a chance medical discovery cleared his blood of the inherited taint, and set him at last on an even keel.

  One can never tell. Who has not seen splendid talented children born from base soulless stock, and splendid parents cursed with worthless and evil children? Psychologists are baffled by the paradox. In the case of evil children, they usually accuse the mothers either of weaning them too early, or of weaning them too late, or of bottle-feeding them, or of beating them for their faults, or of not beating them at all. Or even of pre-natal misconduct. But it is never quite so simple. Heredity, which is as powerful a factor as environment, has become far too complex a subject for even a gifted psychologist to lay down the law about. I prefer to think that a child is born either with or without nobility of heart; and that although a mother may either foster or discourage this gift, she cannot be held responsible for its absence. And that goes for fathers as well. I write as a father of eight wholly dissimilar children. And as the eighth of a family of ten, also wholly dissimilar. But I give my mother full marks for nobility of heart and although, being extremely puritanical, she often disapproved deeply of my actions, I never resented her attitude in the least – nor, for that matter, felt that I deserved it.

  This is her story. In 1848, a year of revolution throughout Europe, which sent independent-minded citizens, especially Germans, flocking for refuge to the United States, my grandfather, a Bavarian medical student, was expelled from his Prussian university for protesting against the trial for high treason of a young Jewish socialist named Karl Marx who had married into the Prussian aristocracy. My grandfather thereupon left Germany and travelled all around the Mediterranean. Acco
rding to my mother, he bathed on one occasion in the Dead Sea where the salty slime on his skin so disgusted him that he mounted his horse and rode fifty miles north to the Jordan valley where he washed himself clean. In Spain he was one of the first passengers in the newly-constructed railway from Madrid to Toledo; it had caused great resentment among the muleteers. Finding their livelihood threatened they would lay tree trunks across the track by night and having forced the train to stop, would rob and terrorize the passengers.

  My grandfather was seated in a compartment opposite an English colonel come to visit the battlefields of the Peninsular War, throughout which he had fought as a young subaltern. Suddenly the train stopped with a bump, shots rang out, followed by curses, screams, prayers and a general hullabaloo. The colonel slowly laid down his copy of The Times, reached for his pistol, primed and cocked it and then returned impassively to his reading. My grandfather, much impressed, thought: ‘What a wonderful race! I must go to England and complete my medical education there.’

  This he did, I believe at St Thomas’s Hospital, and presently volunteered as a surgeon for the Crimean War, where he worked for some months with Florence Nightingale in a nightmare hospital at Scutari.

  Just before sailing he had married a Danish girl, the orphan daughter of Tiarks, the Greenwich astronomer, but my mother, his first child, was not born until the war had ended. They returned together to Germany, where he presently became Professor of Medicine at Munich University and, so far as I know, the first doctor in Europe to supply his hospital with tubercle-free milk; which he did by buying a farm and personally testing his herd of sixty cows. He had learned about infected food and drink at Scutari.

  My mother, born in London at the house of a Miss Briton, my grandmother’s guardian, was soon the most responsible member of a huge family of boys and girls, and appointed by her father to keep them clean and in good order – which the scared, gentle little Dane, her mother, was incapable of doing. She took the job seriously and soon earned the nickname of ‘Scrubbing-brush’. My uncles and aunts all turned out good citizens but, though later expressing their gratitude to her, were not altogether sorry when she was suddenly whisked off to London. That was the year 1873.

  The reason given was that Miss Briton, now decrepit and lonely, needed a cheerful lady-companion; but in effect my mother had been banished from Munich for her own good. The then Bavarian Prime Minister – or so I later heard from an aunt – had fallen in love with her at a ball. Though rich, handsome, noble, virtuous and popular, he had two great disadvantages: he was far too old for her, and he was a Roman Catholic. My impression is that her heart responded, but that the match could not possibly be accepted by so Protestant a family as hers. Marriage would mean Catholic grandchildren, which in turn would mean that the religious unity of the family would be broken. The Prime Minister could not very well pursue her to London; nor would Miss Briton have admitted him across her threshold had he done so.

  Here the story grows rather grim. My mother knew where her duty lay and always followed it, by however thorny a path. She felt bound to obey her experienced and powerful father, and at the same time to pay the debt of love that her mother owed Miss Briton. So she became not only lady-companion but cook-housekeeper, secretary and nurse to an old recluse living in a tall, cold, inconvenient late-Georgian house in Kensington. Miss Briton, of whose family I know nothing except that they manufactured lead soldiers, suffered from a delusion of extreme poverty. My mother had to sleep on a straw mattress in an iron bed next door to her, and all other rooms but kitchen, toilet, cellar and living room were kept locked up. She was given so minute a house-keeping allowance that she always had to buy the poorest cuts of meat and the cheapest fruit and vegetables; and to practise the most rigid economy with coal. She learned never to throw away a crust, always to scrub potatoes rather than peel them, to deny herself all finery and never even indulge in scented soap. Nor had she any friends of her own age, if only because she could not offer a fair exchange of hospitality with them. Her one solace was a piano.

  Her brothers and sisters in Bavaria grew up, ate well, drank well, made scores of friends, were taken on tours to the picture galleries of Italy, and to Vienna for the Opera, attended the best concerts, married, had children. But she missed everything and spent her evenings playing bezique with Miss Briton, who got so upset when she lost that my mother had to bend her conscience, just a little, by cheating herself and allowing Miss Briton the victory. Apart from reading ‘improving’ books from a library – I don’t think she ever read a novel in her life, except in old age to please my father – and occasionally visiting the museums in the neighbourhood, she had no real life at all. She soon lost all traces of her German accent, though Miss Briton, who had been born in the reign of George III taught her a very old-fashioned form of English; so that she used, I remember, to pronounce ‘gas’ as ‘gahs’ and ‘soot’ as ‘sutt’.

  If she had been sacrificed in this way at the age of twenty-five or so, when she knew more about the world, she would doubtless have taken a more independent line, asking to be relieved at her post, occasionally at least, by one of her four sisters. She would also have insisted on more help in the house and a higher standard of living. But no friend appeared to fight her battles for her, and at least she was not a nun. So she prayed, suffered, hoped and did her duty cheerfully.

  One morning, many years later, in the 1880s, Miss Briton, who liked to be called ‘Granny’, sighed: ‘Dear Amy, I fear that I may have no more money left in the bank after this grievous expense of mending the broken water-pipes. Pray, my dear, set my mind at rest! I do not, as you know, like to trouble you with money matters but today, I beg you, go to my room – here is the key of my writing desk – for I wish you to see what money we have left, if any. It would be a great inconvenience if we had to dismiss the scrubbing-woman.’

  Half an hour later, after going through piles of quarterly and annual bank-statements, my mother came down in a daze, saying: ‘Granny, only imagine! You are RICH! Read these!’

  Yes, she was worth over one hundred thousand pounds, which today would have the purchasing value of perhaps five million dollars.

  ‘This is indeed most welcome news, Amy. If the bank has made no error, we can now retain the scrubbing-woman. And, as you know, you are my sole heiress when I come to die.’

  So my mother bought herself another blanket and no longer lived wholly on porridge, parsnips and scrag-end of mutton as heretofore, and a year later Miss Briton died in her sleep. That was the year 1890, when a woman was reckoned a ‘wall-flower’ at the age of twenty-seven and an ‘old maid’ by thirty-two. Being now nearly thirty-six, my mother decided to go to India as a medical missionary. She did her training and was on the point of booking a one-way passage by the P & O when –

  I should have mentioned that as inheritrix of this huge fortune my mother had decided that she might prove a better missionary if she disburdened herself a little – like the loaded camel in the Gospel parable which could not be led through the Needle’s Eye gate at Jerusalem without removal of its panniers. But she was not altogether imprudent. Though dividing her inheritance in five equal parts, one of which she gave to each of her four married sisters, she kept one for an emergency.

  The emergency came almost at once. My mother’s family, the von Rankes, were already connected with the Anglo-Irish Graves family. Her learned grand-uncle, Leopold von Ranke, since famous as the ‘Father of Modern History’ because the first historian to insist ‘on what had actually happened, rather than what he would have liked to have happened’ – as my mother put it to me very clearly – had to the surprise of both nations married the beautiful Clarissa Graves, a Reigning Toast of Dublin. So it was natural enough for my mother to meet Clarissa’s nephew, Alfred Perceval Graves, already well known as a song writer. He had written ‘Father O’Flynn’, ‘Trotting to the Fair’, ‘The Jug of Punch’ and many other late Victorian favourites – now too often regarded as folk-songs, though the cop
yright will remain in our family until the year 1985 – but, being a bad business man, made no money from them. His wife had recently died and he was now a struggling Government Inspector of Schools in the West of England.

  I do not know whether her family and his arranged the marriage in contemporary style, but certainly both my mother and my father agreed to its convenience. He was active, sprightly, good-looking and the son of an Irish bishop. She was tall, strong, beautiful, with an unlined face and black hair that did not turn grey for another half-century. And had a great many wifely talents. So she consulted her conscience, which told her that God had protected her against a previous unwise and irreligious marriage, and that the Indians were less deserving than this sad, charming, talented Protestant widower – only nine years older than herself – with five high-spirited quarrelsome children in need of a new mother’s care. So the wedding took place soon afterwards.

  At first, to judge from a diary which has survived, life was astonishing and difficult. Too many things happened, too many people came calling. My mother who did not expect at so advanced an age – she was now thirty-six – to have children, had never in her life shared a double bed with anyone or even, it seems, been taught the facts of life. The five orphans naturally resented her taking the place of their wonderful, joking Irish mother, and her German Scrubbing-brush methods were far from suitable for Irish children, two of them red-haired. Moreover my father, for all his respect and affection for my mother, was still in love with Janey Cooper, his first wife about whom he used to talk in his sleep. Which gave my mother nightmare dreams about meeting Janey in Heaven where although there is ‘no marrying or giving in marriage’ such encounters could not help being awkward for wives unable to forget earthly monogamic principles.

  And Janey had always kept him in order by constant playful teasing, which was a technique wholly beyond my mother’s knowledge or powers. She had been trained to obey the Head of the House, without question or evasion; which was not the best thing for his character. They never bickered but mainly because, though my father was a hot-tempered man, it takes two to make a quarrel and at worst she looked pained and disappointed.