had made an annotation in his book. Thursday, twentieth day, William had got out of his bed to give a lecture. He was brought back to his house in a state of collapse. Twenty-second day of this month, an incident occurred in the night; let us say the rupture of a small vessel, let us say some bleeding into a small space, let us say some leakage, let us say he’s a goner.
After this, they send for John, and he comes, of course. Whoever lives longest will win the contest. If he is honest with himself—and he is always that—he will say their quarrel did not so much touch on the structure of the placenta, as it touched on who should take credit for the work of discovering about it. For he thought Wullie had beaten him out of glory, as Wullie often did; he humble, meek, and useful, and Wullie your high-society dandy. But what does it matter now—your man collapsed among his pillows, white as thin paper, crying.
March 29: the spring long in coming: buds sealed on the trees still, and Wullie ebbing visibly. He speaking, he’s saying, “John, when you come to it, as I have, as I know I have—when you come to it, it’s not hard to die.”
He leans forward, and with a handkerchief dabs a spool of dribble from his brother’s lower lip.
Some lawyer of William’s is sitting beside the bed. He leaps up and flitters by John’s elbow, as he crosses the room to stare down into the street. “He’s left you naught,” he says. “Dear Mr. Hunter. Don’t think it.”
“I wanted naught,” John says. His voice rasps in his throat.
William is still calling out to him: believe it, John, believe it, dying’s not so hard.
Tears are blurring his eyesight. He stands with his back to the bed, so as not to show them. He says, “It’s poor work, brother, if it comes to that.”
At the Black Horse that night, there was a scene the Giant had not prepared for. Joe Vance, his face white, his little hands moving up and down. “For I cannot abide,” he said. “I cannot bide more.”
“But Vance, my agent,” the Giant said. “For grief’s sake, don’t abandon me.”
“Not at this juncture,” said Constantine Claffey; who had become—the Giant did not know how—part of his treat.
“I can no longer stay in this town,” said Vance.
“Ah, come, come,” said Claffey. “Dear Joe, you are drink taken. Tomorrow you will think again.”
“Tomorrow I will not,” said the wrecked and weeping agent. “I must remove or die. I cannot be here in this city. The streets are thronging with opportunity, the stones running with gore. I have read the bible of the strangling necks, their handbooks and their lore, and I feel the pull of England’s fatal cord: Jack Ketch is coming for me. For Ketch is what they call the hangman, he has but one name, and that one is not his own.”
“Jack Ketch, to my knowledge,” drawled Constantine, “has been dead these many hundred years.”
Said Pybus, “It is what he saw at the puppet show. At Bartholomew. He is unhinged by it.”
“Unhinged?” said Claffey. “He is a gate flapping in the gale.”
John Hunter is sitting in the dark, among his skulls. He’s knuckling his own head. He’s saying, Not hard to die. He’s saying, Poor work if it comes to that. He’s saying, Oh God blast. And Wullie, with more work in him, years more work yet. And he’s saying, I’m sure I’ll never die: except in a fit where the world looks yellow, in a fit where upright objects slope, when the pain in his chest so starves his brain that nothing filters through but narrow and yellow and slanted: where he begins violently to daydream, and the world in those dreams is close and full of texture and the snuff of death and its very colour, which colour he now knows, and different God damn me from the blue of Wullie’s face, as different God damn me as the lark from a starling.
When they woke up next morning, Joe Vance was gone.
“You had to expect it,” Claffey said. “It was a case of blind panic. My brother says he’s seen it before, in men who’ve been in London six months or a year. A sort of addling begins in their heads, a scrambling, he calls it, in the senses—they cannot help it, but the next thing is they are cut and run.”
Pybus shook his head. Poor old Joe. They did all, truly, commiserate with him.
One snag. This was not discovered till the Giant rose, muzzy-headed and nauseous, sometime after eleven. Along with Joe had gone the Giant’s bag of money, seven hundred in pounds sterling.
“I’ll scour the bugger,” Claffey said. “I’ll scour him out. I scoured for Caskey and I found her and I beat her sodden skull in. I’ll do the same for Vance. There’s not a ditch in this ville where he can hide from me. There’s not a hole so low that my eye won’t be in it.”
“Why break sweat?” said his brother Constantine. He dusted some debris from his waistcoat. “Think about it, bro—what does it matter to you that the Giant’s money’s gone? ’Tisn’t as if you were seeing the colour of it.”
“That’s true, I suppose,” Claffey said.
The Giant lies on his back on the floor. Their legs weave about him, so do their verbals. He puts his hands over his ears to stop the sound, but to do that he has to take them away from his eyes, and then light filters in. He closes his lids hard, he screws them down. But all the same the red winter’s day nips under his skin, and steals his blackness.
Let me be blindfolded, he thinks. He remembers Jankin’s dream, out of which the idiot spoke a line of verse:
He thinks,
Let us say we reverse time. Suppose the Holy Innocents grow up. Suppose they grow up and one becomes a horse-thief and another a bigamist, one tells lies in the journals and another fires his neighbour’s barn, say one becomes a soldier, say one becomes a whore: say they trample through Palestine, conflagrating, confabulating, mad and dirty as Uxbridge brick-makers, say one becomes an idiot, and one becomes a king.
Where’s your Herod then?
The Giant’s ribs heave, up and down, up and down.
Men staring down at him. Strangers, in all but name. And estimating. Sizing him up. Selling by the inch.
“So, now,” said Con Claffey smoothly, “you can work the freak as he should be worked. Never mind the beau- monde and their half-crowns. Half-crowns are all very well, but there is a limited quantity in circulation. All the
