Complete Short Stories (56 page)

‘You, too, Prof?’

I changed the subject. ‘What’s your job these days, Mex?’

‘Selling encyclopedias. But I don’t wear this hat on duty.’

‘Good encyclopedias?’

‘I wouldn’t call them good, Prof. Every time I look up a subject I know something about – haven’t we all our own little private pools of knowledge? – by God, it’s always wrong. Like news reports about suicides in your own street: all slanted.’

‘How do you account for that, Mex?’

‘I guess the editors don’t pay the writers enough.’

‘Might be. I don’t know about the States, but nowadays in England
the editors expect learned men to feel honoured by contributing, and offer them around five dollars a thousand words. That was all right fifty years ago, but now learned men are too busy teaching or researching or advising the government to accept the honour. So the editors hire hacks for the job, and the encyclopedias go downhill, and the honour is every year less of an honour.’

‘Why don’t they
raise their fees?’

‘That would make the encyclopedia too expensive.’

‘Too bad,’ said the barman frowning.

‘Well,’ I said grimly, ordering three whisky sours – the third one for an old Negro with a flattened nose and cauliflower ears, an ex-fighter who had joined us. ‘Speaking out, it’s quite simple, really. There’s thousands of clever, industrious graduate students at hundreds of universities,
all in need of doctorates in history or philosophy or literature or medicine or something – to give them a higher academic grade and raise their income level. Grant me them for the sake of my argument.’

‘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.’

N
OT 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.

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. According 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.