The Thousand Deaths of Mr Small Page 16

  “A hundred and two pounds seven-and-six,” said I. Small, taken off his guard.

  “A hundred and two pounds seven-and-six, good God! Oh, you schlemazzel, oh you … put that beer away and have a brandy, for God’s sake.”

  While they were sipping brandy, Solly Schwartz said: “A hundred and two pounds seven-and-six…. Isn’t your wife’s father well-to-do?”

  “I’d rather beg with an organ and a monkey in the streets,” I. Small muttered, moodily twisting and turning his glass.

  “Why?”

  I. Small stammered: “It … I … From the first they … what with one thing and another, a person doesn’t like to, to, to make himself look—look——”

  “—Small?”

  “Yes, what is it?” said I. Small, jumping as if he had heard the tinkle of the shop-door bell.

  Solly Schwartz looked at him, smiling and shaking his predatory head. “Srulke,” he said, “if you live a thousand years you’ll never learn enough to blow your nose. A hundred and two pounds seven-and-six! Get away with you!”

  The needle-point of his contempt penetrated the woolly blanket that was enveloping I. Small’s consciousness and touched a nerve, so that, prodded to alertness, he shouted: “Who’s this, Mr. Bandervilt? By him a hundred pounds is nothing? Go on, laugh at me. Go on, why don’t you laugh?”

  Then his lowered eyes saw the crocodile-head of the walking-stick, through two tears. Stroking the exquisitely-carved tail of the crocodile he said: “Well, the time has come to talk, not to act. We must face facts…. You’re young, Shloimele, one of these days you’ll learn there’s two classes in society. You, already, you got a motor-car … already you are in society … Enough. Enough is as good as … enough. What are you writing?”

  Solly Schwartz said: “This,” and scaled a little oblong of blue paper on to the table. “A present for you. It’s open. Don’t lose it. Take it to the bank to-morrow morning and they’ll give you the money across the counter.”

  “What do you mean? What’s the idea? What’s this?”

  “Put it in your pocket.”

  “It says here two hundred pounds,” said I. Small, trembling. “What’s this for?”

  Almost dreamily, Solly Schwartz said: “Schlemazzel, I’ve got a long memory. Do you remember nine years ago when you went to Cohen’s to try on a jacket?”

  “I was always fussy about my clothes,” said I. Small. “I never wore ready-made. A man I know, I forget his name, took me to Cohen and made me to measure for a special price.”

  “Pressburger, that was——”

  “—Quidleright! That was where I met you, Schloi! You was a nothing, then, a bit of a schnip.”

  “You pay a penny to see things like me pickled in a jar, in a sideshow on Hampstead Heath,” said Solly Schwartz, dispassionately. “You remember where we met, Srul?”

  “I went to (excuse me) make water, and you were in the laventory. Crying, Solly.”

  “Crying my eyes out,” said Solly Schwartz, calmly, but through clenched teeth. “And you said: ‘What is it, boychik?’”

  “And what was it, boychik?”

  “Never mind. Then you said: ‘Come on, boychik, wipe your nose and come out with me and let’s eat a sausage.’”

  “And why not?” asked I. Small.

  “Well, stick that in your pocket,” said Solly Schwartz, pointing to the cheque.

  “But what for, tell me—why?”

  “Why not?” said Solly Schwartz, with all the pride of Lucifer in his eyes, striking his chest so that it thudded like a muffled drum. “Schwartz does not forget a friend or an enemy. Put that in your pocket, schlemazzel, drink up and I’ll drive you home in my motor-car.”

  I. Small, dumbfounded, stunned as surely as if he had been struck on the head with a club, could only say: “We … we … we went to … to Isaacs, and we had for a few pence a Frankfurter with a bit potato sellid. I don’t … I can’t … what do you mean, tell me, what? Speak!”

  Smiling, Solly Schwartz said: And we had a glass of ginger-beer apiece.”

  “Ginger-beer, schminger-beer—a penny glass of … What difference, ginger-beer! To my worst enemy I give a glass ginger-beer, for God’s sake!”

  “Put that in your pocket and drink up,” said Solly Schwartz. He added contemptuously, but not without sadness: “And I said to myself: ‘That such a fine man with an eighteen-carat gold moustache should treat me to Frankfurters and ginger-beer!’ Good God!”

  “No jokes? About me you said that?” said I. Small, with tears on his cheeks.

  “Come on, come on, Srul.”

  So I. Small was rushed in a daze through the roaring streets until he found himself standing alone outside his own door in Noblett Street, leaning on a wonderful walking-stick; sobered by shock but so astounded that he wondered whether he had been walking in his sleep.

  When Millie saw the walking-stick, she screamed: “What’s this? Haven’t I got enough——”

  “—Shush, Millie, I found it.”

  “Where did he find it?”

  “Where? In a bus.”

  “What bus? That’s all he’s got to do with his money, ride about in buses all day long. What bus, Srul, what bus? Where were you going on a bus? Much he cares what happened to his daughter while he was riding up and down in buses.”

  “What happened? To the little girl what happened—speak!”

  “While he’s been joyriding in buses, that Piccadilly Johnny with his walking-stick, I’ve had to have a doctor in the house.”

  “Why? Millie, for God’s sake, what for? God forbid a doctor!”

  Millie managed to convey to him that after he had stamped out of the house like a wild beast little Priscilla had picked up a shirt button and stuck it up her nose. Now a shirt button, stuck up the nose, is likely at any moment to reach the brain, and the consequences are terrible. Millie did her duty as a mother—she screamed. A doctor was called in—a very good doctor—a physician and surgeon. With extraordinary skill he had inserted the fourth finger of his left hand into the little girl’s nostril and, exercising all his strength, pulled out the shirt button in half a second; for which he had charged five shillings. But it was quite all right, as long as I. Small had enjoyed himself riding in buses.

  “How is she, where is she?” asked I. Small, appalled.

  “I put her to bed. Please God——”

  I. Small went to their bedroom, where the baby’s cot was. Priscilla was lying on her back, kicking her legs, and trying to screw a pillowcase-button into her left ear. She was delighted by the sensation she had made and hoped that the nice-smelling doctor would come again and poke his soft finger into her ear. Cooing and gurgling, she smiled at the ceiling as an astronomer might smile at the stars, delighted by the infinite permutations and combinations of the cosmos. She had stuck a button up her nose; but this was only a beginning. It seemed to her, then, that that nostril was only one of many delightful holes with which she was perforated: she was an unexplored world.

  But I. Small, seeing her screwing the button into her ear, yelled: “Halp! Millie, halp!”

  Then everyone made such a noise that a policeman on his beat stopped and gazed steadfastly at the door until the noise subsided. Some loiterer who had nothing better to do than walk in Noblett Street asked, eagerly: “What’s up?”

  “Just a little family affair,” said the policeman.

  “Me, I send the God-forbids to Sunday school, so me and the missis can ’ave a bit of a cuddle in peace and quiet.”

  “There’s a lot to be said for religion,” said the policeman, weightily, pounding his way on his beat.

  As he had lied about the walking-stick I. Small said nothing about the cheque, because he was afraid to tell Millie that he had spent the afternoon with Solly Schwartz. Besides, the cheque might not be good—it could not be. His enigmatic silence drove Millie through three stages of rage, but he said nothing. At nine o’clock on Monday morning he went to the Strand branch of the Belgrave Bank and
pushed the cheque under the grille. The teller examined it closely, and I. Small remembered a tub full of crawling, live black lobsters packed in ice in a fishmonger’s window in Victoria. He felt that the contents of this tub had been poured from the back of his collar into the seat of his trousers. He said: “Is it all right, is it?”

  “Oh, quite all right, sir. How would you prefer it?”

  He left the bank, his pocket heavy with two hundred pounds in banknotes and gold, and his feelings overcame him so that he had to stop at “The George” for a glass of brandy. He was hopelessly bewildered and haggard with anxiety in spite of his tremendous relief.

  He walked home slowly, gnawed by a fresh worry. When Millie asked him where he had got the money, what could he tell her? He was irresolute and incompetent in lying, as in everything else—although, as in everything else, no one could accuse him of failing to do his best. He had the wild idea of telling her that he had found the money in the street; but let it drop. Coming so soon after the tale of the walking-stick, that might be a little too rich for Millie to swallow, and even if she believed him she might insist on his taking the money to the police station. If he told her the truth he would be compelled to admit that he had been loafing in Appenrodt’s with Solly Schwartz while the baby had a button up her nose, and although this confession would be letting him in for no more than a week or ten days of sharp reproach which would soften into innuendo after a further period of niggling recrimination—call it a month in all—I. Small shuddered away from the thought of what Millie might say about Solly Schwartz. He did not like to mention his name in her presence because she hated him and he loved him and would defend him with his last breath … and so one word would lead to another, and there would be no peace in the house. Then he thought that he might tell her that he had had the money all the time, put away for a rainy day; but he knew that he would never get away with this, for Millie could nag the cork out of a bottle, natter the lock off a door. He decided, at last, to say nothing at all; brushed up his moustache with his forefinger, squared his shoulders, and gripped his new stick resolutely, mentally rehearsing the next scene.

  MILLIE: Srul, tell me, where did you get it?

  I. SMALL: (with deliberation) Millie, the time has come to face facts. Where, when, what, who, how, why—this is neither here nor there. Actions speak louder than words. I got it—na!

  MILLIE: Has he been borrowing?

  I. SMALL: That is my own bleddy business. I didn’t thieved it, don’t worry! P’raps I was keeping it all the time for a little surprise. P’raps not. Not another word! Finished!

  MILLIE: He’s showing off, he’s acting. Stop acting!

  I. SMALL: (in a voice of thunder) The bleddy time has come to act, and not to talk! Not another word. What, is she a Scotland Yarderler, I should be blackmailed like a magistrate in a Court Law? Quiet!

  MILLIE: (weakening) Srul, for my sake, to please me——

  I. SMALL: (icily) Millie, you heard what I said. What is neither here nor there is neither here nor there. Don’t waste breath. Take the money. Enough.

  MILLIE: So that’s what you are!

  I. SMALL: Yes!

  He walked faster now, so that he was at home in ten minutes. Millie was in the shop, clinking disconsolately at the shelves full of white boot boxes. She said: “Oh, so there he is, Piccadilly Johnny with his walking-stick. Where’s he been all the morning?”

  “And what’s the matter with my walking-stick, what?”

  “A bill came in for water-rates,” said Millie.

  Then I. Small, who had the money clutched in his hand threw on to the counter a buff-coloured banker’s paper bag containing twenty five-pound notes and a hundred golden sovereigns, and said: “Na, Millie—two hundred pounds.”

  She looked up with a twitch of the eyebrows that appeared to toss over her head the weight of a dozen years, and smiled as she said: “No!”

  I. Small, happy to see her smiling, pinched her cheek and said, laughing: “No? Look and see.”

  “But, Srul, where’d you get it?”

  “From Solly Schwartz, and what do you think of that?” Then, having spoken, he uttered a sharp cry because he knew, to a word, what was coming.

  Millie said, incredulously: “What, that little humpty-dumpty? I don’t believe it.”

  “Oh, beggary!” shouted I. Small, “oh, oh, beggary!”

  “A nice tale. Where could your humpty-dumpty get two hundred pence, let alone two hundred pounds?”

  “Is it a man’s fault he’s born with a little hump?”

  “Don’t change the subject, Srul. Make a clean breast of it——”

  “—Aha! Breast! Now who’s using dirty talk? Two hundred pounds, two hundred pence—hah! In motor-cars Solly Schwartz is riding about—all your life you should be riding about in such motor-cars! And she’s here with her humps and her pence, already!”

  “What did he want to give you two hundred pounds for?”

  “For … for … a, a, a sausage, a glass ginger-beer,” said I. Small. Then, realising how incredible this must sound, he gesticulated limply and said: “Honest truth, Millie.”

  “And where did humpty-dumpty get two hundred pounds?” asked Millie. “You liar!”

  At that, I. Small struck the counter with his beautiful stick, knocking off the tip of the crocodile’s tail, and, roaring: “Enough of her humpty-dumpty,” went into battle.

  CHAPTER XIII

  THE Monopol deal was the first of a dozen such adroit little manipulations. Solly Schwartz did conjuring tricks with surplus waistcoats, juggled with buttons, and disposed of misfit coats, taking profit with his left hand and commission with his right.

  He went to his room only to sleep; was never at rest between half-past six in the morning and midnight, never still. He lived in a kind of cold fever, an intelligent delirium, a patient frenzy, a deliberate desperation, a calculated hurry. He could carry on two conversations and listen to two other conversations at the same time. In three years he wore out two of the steel surgical appliances called “iron feet”.

  His great hooked nose poked itself into the inwardness of things as a parrot’s beak gets into a banana. He talked as if he were haunted by a fear that he might fall dead before the end of every sentence, gesticulating like a threshing-machine, stamping his iron foot like a trip-hammer, and banging the floor with his stick, hammering home his ideas, right or wrong. One grey morning two years after he tricked Monopol into buying the trousers, old Cohen, who was somewhat weary, and whose grip was loosening, said: “The prices, the prices they’re cutting till they bleed. They’re ruining me.”

  Now he had been talking like this for thirty years, so that everyone who heard exchanged winks, nudges, and smiles—everyone but Solly Schwartz. He knew the difference between a grumble and a groan. Following his employer into the little back room he saw the old man pouring a second cup of coffee, while his rolls and butter were untouched, and he was certain that the business was in danger. Then he said: “Mr. Cohen, listen. An idea.”

  “Another idea?”

  “Yes. A West-End tailor-made suit, with two fittings, for thirty shillings.”

  “Meshuggene!” said Cohen. “Let me at least drink a cup of coffee in peace in mein old age. You’re so clever you’re going mad. Get out! A West-End tailor-made suit, two fittings, for thirty shillings he wants! And a bottle champagnier wine thrown in?”

  “A West-End tailor-made suit, two fittings, thirty shillings—that’s what I said. West-End Tailor-made. It’s a name. Look at eau-de-Cologne. Does it comes from Cologne? They make it in Stepney. Look at Vienna sausages—do they come from Vienna? Brick Lane! West-End Tailor-made—in nice gold letters on a big label, with a little white part on the bottom, so you can write in the customer’s name and the date, live in Savile Row. There’s a fortune in it. Take every penny you’ve got, borrow—your credit’s good—every farthing you can lay your hands on. Strike out! It’s as easy as ABC, Mr. Cohen, on my word of honour. Take shops, bran
ches, anywhere, everywhere. Two or three to begin with, in good positions—the Strand, Oxford Street—never mind if it costs you the shirt off your back. Fit them, stock them, advertise in the papers—stick bills on the walls—West-End Tailor-made suit, Two Fittings, Thirty Shillings! In the meantime, bigger workshops, a factory, machines. Button-hole machines, cutting machines—these pasty-faced scheisspots stitching and stitching, they’re a thing of the past, Mr. Cohen. I’d put twenty of them on to a coat, not two or three. You can make five shillings on a suit, easy, if you play your cards clever…. Wait a minute, Mr. Cohen, let me speak, please! Machinery, premises, stock, advertising, all that will run you into thousands? Good, let it! The more you spend the more credit you can get. If you organise,” cried Solly Schwartz, slapping the table with his hand, “in two years, three years, four years, you can sell half a million suits a year and two hundred thousand overcoats. That would bring you in £175,000 a year. Are my figures wrong? Seven hundred thousand times five shillings is £175,000, isn’t it? Make allowances, say I put down profits too high. Call it a lousy half-crown on a suit of clothes. Even then you’ve got £87,500 a year profit. The thing to do is go in, hit hard, what can you lose?”

  Old Cohen, spellbound, had let his coffee get cold. Now he sighed himself back to life and said: “No…. Thirty years ago, twenty years ago, ten years ago; yes. Now, no. When you’re my age …”

  “—All right, Mr. Cohen, I understand,” said Solly Schwartz, with pity. “But look. Listen. The idea about the labels. What about this—make up some smashing samples and get orders for West-End tailor-made suits, to sell to the retailers. Alterations guaranteed, eh? As good as made to measure. I’ll go on the road—what about that? Ten per cent commission. All right, Mr. Cohen?”