Neither Man Nor Dog by Gerald Kersh

Author:Gerald Kersh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Valancourt Books
Published: 2015-04-27T04:00:00+00:00

Dustin—the Broken Man

They brought Dustin back after forty days and forty nights. He had an air of awful dejection, of emptiness and utter weariness.

All deserters have that look when they are caught, or when misery or conscience makes them give themselves up.

Dustin looked sick as he stood in the grim, dim light of the guardroom. The police-sergeant, with a glare in his eyes like candlelight on ice and a rat-trap snapping of his wiry, break-back jaws, said:

“A deserter, a gutless yellow deserter; and a fool to think you could get away with it. Shove him inside!” And his mouth clicked shut; and the cell door clicked shut, and darkness and silence swallowed Dustin until the next day when I saw him scrubbing the guardroom floor.

I do not like deserters, and cannot pity them. But the unmistakable haggard drag of heartache in Dustin’s face moved me to say:

“You poor mug. What made you do it?”

“Fell for a girl,” said Dustin, and laughed again. “Me. Just fancy that.”

“Why not you? It happens to everybody some time or other.”

“Me!” Dustin fished a dirty floorcloth out of the pail and wrung it out.

“Me! I was married once. I had seven years of it. I had all the misery in the world with that woman.

“She ran about with other fellows. She stole everything she could lay her hands on, ran me into debt. I was fond of her. She played me up, led me a dance, and then left me for somebody else. I was a fool.

“She died just before the war, I heard. I don’t know how: I didn’t care any more.

“Last leave, I went to see a man I used to know up North. He had a sister. The sister had a lady-friend that she introduced me to.

“Her name was Dora. She was about twenty-eight. Her picture is among my papers. She’s the prettiest woman I ever saw in my life. I fell for her. I fell bad, hard, terrible hard. She’s dark. You ought to see her eyes. If there was such a thing as black stars . . .”

He scrubbed at a grease-spot.

“The craziest thing is that she fell for me, too,” said Dustin. “She’s a widow, with a bit of money of her own, just enough to live on. That had nothing to do with it. We used to go for walks together.

“She showed me her house over by the edge of the town; a pretty house right in the middle of a sort of park. We got engaged. I gave her a gold ring my father gave me.

“We couldn’t bear to be away from each other . . . that’s the funny part of it; she couldn’t bear to be away from me. She told me so a thousand times.

“Afterwards, she wrote to me about it . . . couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep for thinking about me. Was eating herself up, crying her heart out, had to see me, had got to see me. . . . But that was a wonderful week.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.