Clock Without Hands by Gerald Kersh

Author:Gerald Kersh [Kersh, Gerald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Valancourt Books
Published: 2015-01-12T05:00:00+00:00

FAIRY GOLD

PART I

That was the Friday afternoon when a well-known silk merchant died of the heat in St. Paul’s Churchyard while laughing at a funny story. Suddenly he folded up joint by joint and died before they had time to loosen his collar; and the weather was so op­pres­sively hot that his friends had not sufficient energy to express surprise or simulate grief. Collars were wet, grey ban­dages. Peo­ple were irritable and careless. Water, poured in at the mouth, poured out at the forehead. In the stuffier City offices people were uncomfortably aware of the fact that their neigh­bours had feet. The minutes dragged, clogged with heat and moisture and gritty with dust. Everybody was thinking: To-morrow is Saturday, which is a half-day. The day after is Sunday. Then, thank God, comes August Bank Holiday, so there will be noth­ing to do until Tuesday. This thought, alone, was enough to un­settle many precise minds, and draw attention away from letters to be perused and books to be balanced. Old, tried clerks, accustomed to detecting at a glance one pennyworth of error in ten thousand poundsworth of figures, were horrified to find their con­cen­tration out of focus: they paused toward the feet of red or black columns, bit their lips, banished from their minds insidious fantasies of quiet afternoons in the garden; rushed irritably back to where they had started and, line by line, climbed down again. The stenographers sighed, and there was a great deal of irritable tongue-clicking and some irritating grating of cogs and ratchets as they twirled back the platens of their machines to rub out foolish errors – or ripped away whole sheets before starting again with wet faces and set teeth. Everyone was thinking of cold water or cold beer, green grass or cool shade.

In St. Martin’s-le-Grand a solicitor named Pismire, having read a short letter addressed to Forty Richards and Co. Ltd., scrib­bled an impatient signature and told his managing clerk to have the letter posted. “And now let’s get out of this,” said Mr. Pismire.

This managing clerk was famous, in the City, for his cunning and his caution. He re-read everything five or six times, even his tram tickets. It was said of him that he had dismissed an office boy for wasting too much pencil in the mechanical sharpener. But the day was so hot that, having looked at the letter, he threw it languidly to a typist and told her to send it off at once.

At any other hour of the day he would have noticed that there was something out of the ordinary in the feel of this letter. The firm of Pismire went in for a characteristically elegant note­paper, very thin but beautifully white and opaque, expensively die-stamped with the letter-heading. The managing clerk knew that such sheets tend to stick together, but did not notice, this afternoon, that the typist had used two top sheets of headed notepaper instead of one. She, thinking of something that could never be, pushed the folded letter into an envelope, which she threw into the letter-box.

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