On an Odd Note Read online

  The party went on. Dawn broke and the daughter, although she could hardly stand, insisted on taking out a high-powered roadster. She said she needed a breath of fresh air. She zigzagged at seventy miles an hour along the highway, miscalculated on a hairpin bend and crashed. That was the end of her.

  The bereaved father sold the Seed of Destruction for one cent to a millionaire from Detroit and embraced the Catholic religion.

  And now once again the Seed of Destruction was on the market. The depression had struck America, and the millionaire from Detroit, in straitened circumstances, had sold his collection of jewels to Tortilla, the dealer, who was waiting to see how much he could get for the Seed of Destruction, which I could have bought for twenty-five pounds that day in Ziska’s shop.

  More than two years later, as I was whistling to a taxi in Piccadilly outside the place where they sell dog-collars, an extremely elegant young man stopped me and said, “Excuse me, you’re Mr. Kersh, aren’t you?”

  I said that I was indeed.

  “I don’t think you remember me,” he said.

  I said, “My memory is getting very bad. As a matter of fact, I don’t think I do remember you.”

  “Does the name of Ziska convey anything to you?” he asked. “My name is Ziska. I saw you in my father’s shop.”

  I said, “Why, of course it does. Surely you must be old man Ziska’s son?”

  We shook hands. A taxi came and we shared it. I asked young Mr. Ziska how his father was. He sighed and said, “I have taken over the business. But I’ll never be anything like he was. What a man he was! What a personality! What a business man! But of course, you know, in our business we have to have good eyes. A jeweler who can’t see straight might as well retire. Dad was marvelous. But about five years ago his poor old eyes gave out on him. He got a cataract, had an operation, and he was never the same again. I took over. What a man he was! I dare say you remember that funny business about the Seed of Destruction?”

  “I know,” I said, “because I happened to be on the spot when your father made it up!”

  Young Mr. Ziska said, “Yes, I know. I wish I had a half of the old man’s imagination. I can’t do it. He could spin you a story about anything. I have known him to sell six pennorth of pinchbeck for ten pounds just on the strength of the story he made up about it on the spur of the moment. Well, as I was saying, it was his story that made that Seed of Destruction what it is today. He bought it for fifty shillings and sold it for fifty pounds. And now—I can speak to you freely because you’re an old friend—it must be worth fifty thousand pounds if it’s worth a penny. I’ve been offered four thousand pounds for it.”

  “Oh, have you got it then?” I asked.

  “Yes, I bought it off Tortilla for three thousand pounds. I knew I could get four thousand pounds for it anyway, so I bought it. Who wouldn’t? I knew it would please the old man. He was a great guy. I wanted to give him a little surprise so I brought this Seed of Destruction home and said to him, ‘You’ll never guess what I’ve got.’ Then he asked me what I had got and I told him and he was as pleased as punch. He was pretty sick, and getting on in years, as I dare say you know. I said to him, ‘Well, here you are, Dad, you invented it, you made it, you built it up, you worked miracles with it; you picked a tuppenny-halfpenny spinel out of a boot-box full of rubbish and turned it into a property by your own genius, and here it is—worth a packet. I make you a present of it,’ I said. And then he asked me how much I had paid for it, and I told him three thousand pounds, and he sat up in bed with the ring on his little finger and he shouted ‘Oi!’ and passed away. Heart failure. Shock. It had cost him fifty shillings. He was a great guy. Where are we, Shaftesbury Avenue? I get out here. Nice to have seen you again. Bye-bye.”

  FROZEN BEAUTY

  Do I believe this story?

  I don’t know. I heard it from a Russian doctor of medicine. He swears that there are certain facets of the case which—wildly unbelievable though it sounds—have given him many midnight hours of thought that led nowhere.

  “It is impossible,” he said, “in the light of scientific knowledge. But that is still a very uncertain light. We know little of life and death and the something we call the Soul. Even of sleep we know nothing.

  “I am tired of thinking about this mad story. It happened in the Belt of Eternal Frost.

  “The Belt of Eternal Frost is in Siberia.

  “It has been cold, desperately cold, since the beginning of things . . . a freak of climate.

  “Did you know that a good deal of the world’s ivory comes from there? Mammoth ivory—the tusks of prehistoric hairy elephants ten thousand years dead.

  “Sometimes men digging there unearth bodies of mammoths in a perfect state of preservation, fresh enough to eat after a hundred centuries in the everlasting refrigerator of the frost.

  “Only recently, just before Hitler’s invasion, Soviet scientists found, under the snow, a stable complete with horses—standing frozen stiff—horses of a forgotten tribe that perished there in the days of the mammoths.

  “There were people there before the dawn of history; but the snow swallowed them. This much science knows. But as for what I am going to tell you, only God knows. . . .”

  I have no space to describe how the good doctor, in 1919, got lost in the Belt of Eternal Frost. Out of favor with the Bolsheviks, he made a crazy journey across Siberia toward Canada. In a kind of sheltered valley in that hideous hell of ice, he found a hut.

  “. . . I knocked. A man came; shabby and wild as a bear, but a blond Russian. He let me in. The hut was full of smoke, and hung with traps and the pelts of fur animals.

  “On the stove—one sleeps on the brick stove in the Siberian winter—lay a woman, very still. I have never seen a face quite like hers. It was bronze-tinted, and comely, broad and strong. I could not define the racial type of that face. On the cheeks were things that looked like blue tattoo marks, and there were rings in her ears.

  “ ‘Is she asleep?’ I asked, and my host replied; ‘Yes; forever.’ ‘I am a doctor,’ I said; and he answered; ‘You are too late.’

  “The man betrayed no emotion. Maybe he was mad, with the loneliness of the place? Soon he told me the woman’s story. Absolutely simply, he dropped his brief sentences. Here is what he said:

  I have lived here all my life. I think I am fifty. I do not like people around me.

  About fifteen . . . no, sixteen years ago I made a long journey. I was hunting wolves, to sell their skins. I went very far, seven days’ journey. Then there was a storm. I was lucky. I found a big rock, and hid behind it from the wind. I waited all night. Dawn came. I got ready to go.

  Then I see something.

  The wind and storm have torn up the ground in one place, and I think I see wood. I kick it. I hit it with my ax. It is wood. It breaks. There is a hole.

  I make a torch and drop it down. There is no poisonous air. The torch burns. I take my lamp and, with a little prayer, I drop down.

  There is a very long hut. It is very cold and dry. I see in the light of my lamp that there are horses. They are all standing there frozen; one with hay or something, perhaps moss, between his teeth. On the floor is a rat, frozen stiff in the act of running. Some great cold must have hit that place all of a sudden—some strange thing, like the cold that suddenly kills elephants that are under the snow forever.

  I go on, I am a brave man. But this place makes me afraid.

  Next to the stable is a room. There are five men in the room. They have been eating some meat with their hands. But the cold that came stopped them, and they sit—one with his hand nearly in his mouth; another with a knife made of bronze. It must have been a quick, sudden cold, like the Angel of Death passing. On the floor are two dogs, also frozen.

  In the next room there is nothing but a heap of furs on the floor, and sitting upon the heap of furs is a little girl, maybe ten years old. She was crying, ever so long ago. There are two round little pieces of ice on her cheeks, and in her
hands a doll made of a bone and a piece of old fur. With this she was playing when the Death Cold struck.

  I wanted more light. There was a burned stone which was a place for a fire.

  I look. I think that in the place where the horses are, there will be fodder. True; there is a kind of brown dried moss. The air is dry in that place! But cold!

  I take some of this moss to the stone, and put it there and set light to it. It burns up bright, but with a strong smell. It burns hot. The light comes right through the big hut, for there are no real walls between the rooms.

  I look about me. There is nothing worth taking away. Only there is an ax made of bronze. I take that. Also a knife, made of bronze too; not well made, but I put it in my belt.

  Back to the room with the furs in it, where the fire is blazing bright. I feel the furs. They are not good enough to take away. There is one fur I have never seen, a sort of gray bear skin, very coarse. The men at the table, I think, must have been once, long ago, strong men and good hunters. They are big—bigger than you or me—with shoulders like Tartar wrestlers. But they cannot move any more.

  I stand there and make ready to go. There is something in this place I do not like. It is too strange for me. I know that if there are elephants under the frost, still fresh, then why not people? But elephants are only animals. People, well, people are people.

  But as I am turning, ready to go, I see something that makes my heart flutter like a bird in a snare. I am looking, I do not know why, at the little girl.

  There is something that makes me sorry to see her all alone there in that room, with no woman to see to her.

  All the light and the heat of the fire is on her, and I think I see her open her eyes! But is it the fire that flickers? Her eyes open wider. I am afraid, and run. Then I pause. If she is alive? I think. But no, I say, it is the heat that makes her thaw.

  All the same, I go back and look again. I am, perhaps, seeing dreams. But her face moves a little. I take her in my arms, though I am very afraid, and I climb with her out of that place. Not too soon. As I leave, I see the ground bend and fall in. The heat has loosened the ice that held it all together—that hut.

  With the little girl under my coat, I go away.

  No, I was not dreaming. It is true.

  I do not know how. She moves. She is alive. She cries. I give her food; she eats.

  That is her, over there, master. She was like my daughter. I taught her to talk, to sew, to cook—everything.

  For thousands and thousands of years, you say, she has lain frozen under that snow—and that this is not possible. Perhaps it was a special sort of cold that came. Who knows? One thing I know. I found her down there and took her away. For fifteen years she has been with me—no, sixteen years.

  Master, I love her. There is nothing else in the world that I love. She has grown up with me, but now she has returned to sleep.

  “That’s all,” the doctor said.

  “No doubt the man was mad. I went away an hour later. Yet I swear—her face was like no face I have ever seen, and I have traveled. Some creatures can live, in a state of suspended animation, frozen for years. No, no, no, it’s quite impossible! Yet, somehow, in my heart I believe it!”

  REFLECTIONS IN A TABLESPOON

  I remembered all this in a grim, cold, Northern restaurant. A sour waiter, twisting his face in a pale sneer, banged down a plateful of something flabby floating in gray water and, snarling over his shoulder, said that I could have Spam or boiled salt cod and brussels sprouts to follow. I replied that in the meantime I needed a spoon, so he brought one, wiped it on his trousers, and let it fall with a clang. Then he went away with a shrug of despair. It was a magnificent tablespoon, weighing several ounces, heavily plated and monogrammed—a relic of old, good, solid days. Turning it over I saw the autograph of Gino engraved on the handle.

  Gino’s name, scrawled with a flourish, looked remarkably like Gino himself: the big loop and the fine curly tail of the G were the nose and the mustache, the ino recklessly sprawling downward were the pendulous lower lip and the three fat chins of that noble restaurateur. His silverware had gone under the hammer, I supposed; and I wondered what had happened to the bold brass fittings and the honest round mirrors that used to look so massive and gay in Gino’s Long Bar. Gino, I knew, had turned to dust, which he hated, and to flowers, which he loved—he was always beating away dust or arranging flowers—but his place had been built to last a thousand years. All the same, it began to die when Gino died of an enlarged heart in 1933—I always thought that his heart was dangerously big for a man who owned a restaurant; yes, the place went into a decline and sank from owner to owner until a bomb closed its eyes in 1940. It had been beloved for Gino’s sake—he was a good man, bright and kind; people in trouble found their way to Gino as lost dogs find their way to a watchman’s fire in the cold, inhospitable night. Things pass: they break, or they wear away . . .

  “You don’t like?” grunted the waiter, jerking a contemptuous thumb toward my soup. I said, “I see that you have some of poor old Gino’s silverware here.”

  “You knew him?”

  “He was my friend,” I said, “he gave me credit.” The waiter changed. He stood up and grew taller; he smiled and became friendly. He whispered, “In a minute I get you two nice little lamb cutlets.” We smiled at each other. I was moved—although Gino was dead and the dust carts had dragged away the rubble that had been his house, by God’s grace his generous heart had not stopped beating. The waiter said, “He was patient. My goodness, what would’ve drove me mad, so it only made M’sieur Gino say Well! My Gawd, you remember that yellow woman what she called herself ‘The Countess’? With the scar on her face?”

  “Gino was very patient with her,” I said, “poor woman.” The waiter winked and said, “Don’t drink that muck; I get you two nice little lamb cutlets—they do you more good, yes?” “Yes,” I said and he went away, flapping like a seal on his big flat feet in his shiny black coat.

  . . . The Countess had been a beautiful lady, but when I knew her she was nothing but an attenuated shadow in a late afternoon. Her scar, a small one over her left cheekbone, made her face arresting. She was reminiscent of beauty, as an echo is like a voice. Yet in spite of her wild yellow hair, nobody denied that she was a lady. Have you ever come upon a ruin left tottering after an air raid—some bit of bedroom wall, for example, broken beyond repair, still retaining a few strips of carefully chosen wallpaper? You know that although blast has opened it to the rain and that it is pitiful in its exposure, it has in its day been beloved: it has witnessed certain glorious moments. The Countess was such a ruin.

  She always had a little money on the first of every month—about eight pounds. Then she was a great lady, ready to carry the weight of all the troubles of the world. For about two days she gave drinks to strangers and money to beggars. On the fifth day she would be alone, twitching, with the Black Dog looking over her shoulder into the small glass which she was trying to keep half-emptied until somebody happened to offer her something. It was awful to see her on the edge of the twenty-one arid deserts of her next three weeks. Then Gino would catch the barman’s eye and nod, looking tired and sick. His nod said: Let her have credit. He insisted only that she eat something. Sometimes he would coax: “Madame la Comtesse, for you especially I make a little something—not for anybody, not for everybody, but for you!” She was always contemptuous, and said, “It doesn’t concern me. I am not interested in your little something.”

  “If I have make it, could Madame la Comtesse not be gracious and say, ‘I will taste’?”

  “Very well, only you must cash me a check.”

  “First you must give me your opinion. There is an entrecôte. Nobody could tell, nobody could judge—only you. We beg your opinion.” And so she ate. As for her bill, Gino charged it to ‘Expenses,’ as the saying goes: he chalked it up and washed it out. Knowing this, the Countess grew more and more capricious, intolerably haughty. How could she admit that sh
e was accepting charity? It was out of the question. “Laugh at me, laugh at me now!” she would cry, while her eyes flickered; she could not meet the horrible white stare of the Hangman Sobriety. “Laugh at me, laugh if you like, but I say I could have bought a dozen Ginos a little while ago!” To this, Gino always replied, “Dear lady, there is nothing to buy, nothing at all.”

  The last time I saw her she was trying to cash a check. “September the what?” she asked, making blots on the dateline of a crumpled blue slip with a miniature fountain pen. A respectable bystander said, “The fourth, madam, September the fourth.”

  “Of course it’s the fourth, I know very well it’s the fourth. I didn’t need you to tell me that. . . . Gino, you will cash my check for two pounds?” Gino gave her two pounds and, closing her poor smudged checkbook, slipped it back into her bag. She glared at him and screamed, “You thief! How dare you go over my bag?”

  Gino murmured, “Be nice, put away your checks. Among friends, one trusts. Away, away—put it away!” He knew that her checks were valueless, they always came back; but she, tossing her bewildered head and still trying to write, said: “The fourth?—of what month? Of September . . . September the fourth. . . .”

  I heard Gino mutter, “Oh God, the sea is so wide and the boat is so small!” But then the Countess, waggling her useless checkbook, said with an odious and provocative grin, “I’ll tell you something. The Monk Paphnutius looked into my eyes—I was a girl of fourteen then—and he said, ‘You shall betray and be betrayed, and be loved by one whom you do not love and give your love to one who does not love you! You shall avenge your own victim, and after that you shall order the destiny of an Oriental Empire!’ . . . You and your dirty two pounds—”