The Quick and the Dead

By Gerald Bullett

This is a short, meditative novel written in the first person, recollecting events in the narrator's childhood.

The instigating crisis of the story is the revelation, when he is six, that he is the offspring of an adulterous affair. His biological father has just gone off to war and plays no direct part in the story.

The main characters are his legal father, Robert, a man of generous spirit, his mother, relatives, and two contrasting preachers, one authentic, the other a monster of self-righteousness who meets with a grisly end.

Written with meticulous skill, as is typical of this author, this is a beautiful story that everyone will enjoy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Dec 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781448207121

Gerald Bullett

Gerald William Bullett (December 30, 1893 - January 3, 1958) was a British man of letters. He was known as a novelist, essayist, short story writer, critic and poet. He wrote both supernatural fiction and some children's literature. Bullett was born in London and educated at Jesus College, Cambridge. During World War II he worked for the BBC in London, and after the war was a radio broadcaster. Bullett also contributed to the Times Literary Supplement. Politically, Bullett described himself as a "liberal socialist" and claimed to detest "prudery, prohibition, blood sports, central heating, and literary tea parties".

Book preview

Part One

A Portrait of Calamy

Chapter I

In imagination, not in memory, I can picture the scene vividly enough: Calamy patient and puzzled; his young wife hesitating between temper and tears, not knowing which will the better serve to carry her across a difficult moment. ‘If you’d been anything but a blind old bat, Robert, you’d have known without telling. Claud’s the very spit of his father, as it happens.’ It is all so clear to me that since I was not present at the strange interview, being indeed something less than six years old at the time, it must be that I have had some sort of account of it in later years, and that my intimate knowledge of both persons—of Calamy, of my mother his wife—has quickened a bare record into the semblance of a living memory. Calamy sits in his little shoemaker’s shop with a boot in his hand. He peers over his spectacles, mildly but with pain, at the young woman who, with a light word, and from God knows what frivolous impulse, has robbed him of his only child, cheated him of fatherhood. The door of the shop is open, and the bright day sends a broad shaft of light into the small dim room. Calamy, his eyes filled with that news from another world, can see no cause for anger against the woman. He feels that he does not know her, cannot read her heart, cannot find any way out of his own perplexity. He is sharply aware of nothing but his own loneliness in a world of strange faces. For Essie herself is suddenly and terribly alien to him: she is no longer his Essie, the familiar wife of a seven years marriage, but a queer unaccountable woman who has smilingly deceived him all that time, consorting with an unknown man, bearing the stranger’s child, and keeping her counsel. Calamy cannot understand her at all. ‘But why didn’t you tell me before, Essie? Why did you let me think—all these years——?’

It was on the heels of some such conversation, I always imagine, that I, that morning, went running into the shop from the breakfast-table where my mother had left me. And here history begins, and conjecture—except such conjecture as inextricably mingles with memory—takes a minor part in my symphony. My mother, with an unhappy smile twisting her lips and a false brightness in her eyes, came back into the house as I went into the shop. We met and passed, exchanging neither word nor glance, each of us being busy with private preoccupations. I, with no thought but to watch my father at work for a few minutes before passing on to some other pursuit, planted myself within a yard of Calamy’s elbow and stared gravely. He was then something less than forty, twelve years older than his wife. Rather a short thick-set man, blunt-nosed, round-featured, bearded, and looking older than his years. An erratic tuft of whisker sprouted from each cheekbone; the eyebrows were heavy, the hair already sparse. I see now that to an outsider he may have presented a slightly comic appearance; but to me he was my father, and half my world. He was a rural rather than an urban type, though he had lived the best part of his life within fifteen miles of London City. The whole scene, indeed, was, if one chooses to think it so, ridiculously old-fashioned and in the Victorian manner (fittingly, for the Queen still reigned): Calamy the shoemaker, middle-aged (at least in appearance), bespectacled, dressed for the part, and with a boot held idly on his knees; and myself, a six-year-old child, watching him. Familiar though they were, I had never ceased to take pleasure in his apron, his last, his sharp knife, his cobbler’s wax, his dexterity, and the kindness crinkling about his eyes. And the smell of the shop, which seemed to hold all these delights in essence, was a conscious satisfaction to me, so that still, whenever I encounter it, I am back again in the house of my childhood.

He sat so silent, so still, so unregardful of me, that I was moved to put a question.

‘What are you doing, Robert?’

It amused him to be so addressed by his infant son, and I expected nothing less than a smile in acknowledgement of my sally. But though he looked up at me he did not smile.

‘Eh?’ said Calamy.

He met my look with eyes that seemed vacant of any knowledge of me; then, as I began to be frightened and he saw it, his mind came back as from a long wild journey and he looked at me intently. Intently and with curiosity, not as he had ever looked at me before.

‘Don’t you—don’t you know me?’ I asked. The question slipped out involuntarily. It had not been—nothing so dreadful—in my conscious mind. It came from some wise secret corner of a childish and fearful heart, and the tongue had seized and uttered it without my knowing.

At my question his look changed again. Kindness came suddenly into it.

‘Has Mother been telling you something?’ he asked.

I shook my head. And could think of nothing better than to ask him again what he was doing. It was the boot that troubled me. It was against all expectation and reason that a boot should lie neglected in my father’s lap. I wanted to see him at work on it. To make all things clear, I pointed accusingly.

He put the boot aside. ‘Shall I make you a little pair of boots—boots for a fairy, eh?’

‘I’m not a fairy,’ I said.

For once I had mistaken his meaning, but he seemed to find a strange meaning in my answer, for he pondered it in a silence that endured longer than my patience.

‘A doll then,’ he said at length. ‘Haven’t you a doll that would like a new pair of boots? Run and ask them.’

‘Oh yes,’ I cried. ‘Jacko wants a new pair. He told me so this very morning.’ This was the kind of conversation I understood. I could not have too much of it. ‘Will you please make some for him, Father Calamy?’

Calamy pretended to be very busy. This was all part of our game. ‘Eh? New boots? Well, we’ll see. What size does he take, this child of yours?’

We discussed that point in man-to-man fashion. Calamy, meanwhile, was quietly setting to work. First he cut out, with infinite delicacy, a pair of lilliputian bootsoles measuring perhaps an inch from end to end. Enchanted by their promise I resolved that no Jacko, no doll, could ever deserve them; and there flashed into my mind the idea of making a new person, a puppet of my own creation, that should be worthy of them. I would make him from the feet upwards. (And, in the event, I did so—the first time in history that a man has grown up out of his own boots.)

‘How’s that for a start?’ said Calamy, but more to himself, I thought, than to me.

I clapped my hands and began dancing delightedly. I had forgotten that I was the grown-up father of a family. The uppers were now being fashioned out of two thin slices of leather; holes were drilled down their front; laces of black thread were inserted. The soles were made smooth and shining underneath, the rest blackened and polished. And the result was a pair of boots so minute, so perfect, so clamorously suggesting the fellow that must ultimately walk in them, that it seemed to me a miracle. I did not then, for all my precocity, realize how great a miracle.

Lost in rapture over the completed work of art, I did not at once become aware that Calamy’s watching eyes had lit up once again with that old, disconcerting light of inquiry. But at last I looked up and met his gaze, and the darkness of another world, an adult world of hunger and desolation, came beating with strong wings about my moment’s joy.

‘So, Claud,’ said Calamy, as if in question, ‘you’re not my little boy, after all.’

I stared in dismay, and with a still sharper pang I saw that tears stood in my father’s eyes, even while his lips seemed to smile.

‘Why aren’t I?’ I asked, thinking I had done wrong and was to be punished.

‘But you’ll come and play with me just the same, won’t you?’ added Calamy quickly, stretching out a hand to me.

So it was not I, but he, that was being punished. I clutched his hand. ‘But I want to be your little boy,’ I cried, gulpingly. My universe was on the point of collapse, and I was aware of a dreadful loneliness—whether his or mine was beyond my question. Stumbling forward I hid my head against the leather apron of his lap. ‘I will be. I am.’ Passion came sobbing out of my small body.

Calamy, in a brisk bustling fashion, patted my head.

‘That’s right, my dear. Don’t cry any more. I say—see what we’ve forgotten!’

His voice was cheerful and urgent. My grief slowly subsiding, I looked up. ‘What?’ I asked.

‘Why, don’t you see! I’m a pretty shoemaker, upon my word! These blessed new boots of ours ain’t got any tongues in ‘em.’

I examined the boots, and it was even so. I was duly shocked. ‘We’ll have to take the laces out,’ I explained, ‘and see about it.’

‘So we shall,’ agreed Calamy. ‘It’s lucky I’ve got you here to help me. I’d be in a queer pickle without you, I reckon.’

Chapter II

I have asked what frivolous impulse drove my young mother to tell her secret, after keeping it so long. But the very phrase begs a question that has never been answered. I cannot reconcile with my knowledge of her the idea that she was either deliberate, or careless, in that piece of cruelty. My Uncle Claybrook, who married her eldest sister, always believed that some gossip must have reached Calamy which, in innocent indignation, he repeated to her; and that she, who had no instinct or talent for concealment, saw nothing for it but to confess. It is difficult for a son to know and tell the whole truth about his mother; but the difficulty is accidental, not intrinsic; for love, when it is not self-seeking, sharpens the sight, is in fact an indispensable condition of understanding; and though as a child I was too near her to see her in true focus, and too dependent to be capable of impartial witness, I have had abundant time, in the long silence that has supervened, to regard that winsome, wayward, childlike young woman with a steady eye. If she were restored to me now, I should be almost as much her senior as Calamy was; and the time is long past when I