The Song of the Flea Read online

  If Busto had been a little less avaricious they would have hated him. But he had become a Character. In a way, they were proud of him. If he had ever been detected in an act of mercy, they would have despised him. But Busto remained Busto—intransigent, uncompromising in his pitilessness, greedy as a quicksand, inhospitable as the east wind, untouchable as a broken-toothed old wolf. And therefore they forgave him. They almost liked him. He was one in a million. A Busto was not born every day. There were some who admired him because he had made good—that is to say, made money. His house provided something more than four walls and a roof. Having stayed there, if only for a couple of weeks, you had something in common with many other men and women—something to talk about; grounds for intimacy.

  For example: you could talk about Busto’s Art Gallery. People like to put pictures on their walls, but when they run away without paying their rent the pictures are always left. Busto’s house was hung with the pictorial detritus of forty years. Sometimes someone left a picture in a frame; in which case, the picture not having been worth five shillings of any fool’s money, Busto sold the frame and hung the canvas on a wall. In general his tenants satisfied themselves with plates torn out of illustrated magazines. So you might have seen half a dozen September Morns, caricatures of chimpanzees by Starr Wood, cartoons by Spy and Ape. There were several First Kisses, Love-Me-Love-My-Dogs, a score of cavaliers kissing chambermaids, a representative handful of the drawings of Phil May, a quantity of nudes, and a surprising number of nostalgic Old English tavern scenes. Many of Busto’s tenants liked to look at big clean interiors in cosy firelight, where jovial red-faced men lounged in red coats, cutting mighty rounds of red beef and drinking deep draughts out of twinkling silver tankards … poor devils! And anyone who has looked into Busto’s room, the old wash-house, will tell you that over his bed hangs an oleo of La Gioconda, which he believes to be a faithful representation of the Virgin Mary.

  Once upon a time there was a time when Busto believed in God. He is a mystery. There is one man who says that Busto was the rightful King of Italy; and another who maintains that he belonged to the Camorra. Others, more plausibly, insist that he was nothing but a retired valet who took to apartment house-keeping on legitimate plunder—discarded suits, pilfered studs, filched shirts, and tips. You could talk about Busto’s wealth. He has lived in a hole in the ground for fifty years, always taking and never giving. How could he help being rich? … And assume that he has put away five pounds a week for only forty years—that makes ten thousand pounds….

  The conversation goes on and on. You take your cold coffee sip by sip, making it last. In a little while it will be dawn. You do your best to look animated, calm and prosperous … you are a gentleman, killing time, waiting for another day. Meanwhile, you take care not to draw too hard on your cigarette: you have only one left, cunningly secreted in your right-hand coat pocket. In due course you and your fellow-outcast get back to wondering how Busto does it. How is he always awake and about at the wrong time? How does he know just when to come upstairs and intercept you? You talk of vultures that sense their prey from afar; you talk of the Sixth Sense; you discuss the telepathic sensations of identical twins and, putting away a few lumps of sugar while the waitress is not looking, you make romances, fairy-tales.

  It never occurs to you that Pio Busto has seen you before: he knows exactly how your needs change your face, your gestures, the tone of your voice and the sound of your footsteps. You are his living, and he knows you to the backbone.

  In place of a brain Busto had a sort of abacus, some rattling contraption of black-and-white beads and wire, designed to record how much people owed him, and nothing more. If you were of an excitable, imaginative temperament you could almost hear it working. A pavement artist who had lived in his house, a dribbling old drunkard who claimed to have seen better days, made up a strange composition of balls and barbed wire drawn with coloured chalks on wrapping paper, and entitled it Busto—A Portrait. He showed it to some of the other tenants in the “Duchess of Douro” and, for the first time in his life, felt that his work was appreciated. “I don’t know why, but it kind of reminds you of the old bastard,” said a little man like a sparrow who picked up a precarious living following the horses.

  Busto had learned how to write his name in great black letters, so that it had the spine-chilling look of a voodoo death warning: but he had never had occasion to learn the alphabet. He had no use for writing. The little black-and-white balls always slid into place, left or right, up and down the parallels under his flat skull. Only the credit side of the abacus had rusted and grown fallible: there, the white beads stuck and had to be jolted into place. When it came to giving change, Busto became feeble-minded: after two or three days he shrugged and blinked like an imbecile … he was getting old, he said, and begged pardon … he could not remember. He never failed to remember your indebtedness to him. The wires on the debit side were highly polished, worn thin, tuned tight like steel guitar strings. And so it happened that one morning Busto got out of his mysterious little bed at a quarter to six and, obedient to a blind reliable impulse, went upstairs to the eleven-shilling room on the top floor back, and listened.

  He heard nothing. Busto rapped with a knuckle upon one of the blistered brown panels. There was no answer. He opened the door very gently, stretched his neck and looked in. He saw the old familiar wash-stand with the blue basin and soap-dish, and the red-and-yellow jug. In the mauve-and-green pail below stood the inevitable scummed grey washing water. There was an awful stillness on the face of this water. Busto went into the room, looked about him sharply, and cried out in anguish. The bed—a secondhand wooden bed sawn down to look like a divan—was disordered and cold. Mr. Pym was gone. Busto cursed himself for his carelessness. Pym must have crept out before dawn: a certain warmth lingered between the blankets. Snarling like a dog, Busto went to the wardrobe and jerked open the door. There was nothing inside but a musty smell. Under the bed he found a pair of shoes, the uppers of which had been carefully polished. Mr. Pym had tried to keep up appearances. The soles were worn through, and he had tried to repair them with a sixpenny tube of the stuff called “Liquid Leather”, but the fibrous sediment that it left behind had fallen away, leaving a sort of high-water-mark or fuzz somewhere near the instep. After that Mr. Pym had drawn outlines of his feet on the covers of a calf-bound “Life of Alexander the Great”, cutting them out with an old razor blade and smearing them with Vaseline to make them waterproof before fitting them into his shoes. But they had worn through. Pym had tried, with his inexpert hand, to screw on a pair of cheap rubber heels. He had no idea of the proper technique. In the heel of the left shoe there was a little jagged hole; in the right was embedded the head of a screw. Busto could see that this undesirable tenant had made experiments: a sixpenny rubber belt had been cut into two-inch lengths and subjected to the action of fire. Pym had imagined, no doubt, that he could make these strips of rubber stick so as to cover the holes in his shoes if he applied them while they were still hot and bubbling. It had not worked. He had given up, and gone out in his last pair of presentable shoes—the thin-soled ones with the down-trodden heels. Busto had the eye of a detective: he did not fail to notice certain strands of muddy wool on the floor. These, he knew, had been cut with the same old safety-razor blade from the cuffs of Pym’s trousers. Pym had been making himself beautiful.

  Busto gnashed his teeth. “My own father!” he said. He meant that after this he would not give his own father three days’ grace if he had a father. But then he noticed that the table was covered with little stacks of paper. One of these was nearly two inches thick, grey-and-blue, with typewritten lines and scribbled corrections. Another, much smaller, was black with microscopic handwriting. The rest was blank paper, flimsy porous stuff sold at tenpence a ream. Busto’s fists, which he had raised above his head in anguish and hate, came slowly down. He knew that hope was not lost, because Pym was trying to write a book. Certain people came back: mechanics for the
ir tools; actors for their shirts; and writers for their bits of paper.

  Busto padlocked the door and went downstairs. He was not really worrying: he was merely cursing himself for his stupidity. Last rent-day Mr. Pym had gone out with his little typewriter and returned, affluent, without it. “I ought to have known,” said Busto.

  He went back to his room and listened. There was a gentleman on the second floor front who owned a musical instrument, a portable gramophone and a big case of records, whose rent was due at noon: a man from the North of England, who had played the trumpet in a colliery band but had come South hoping to get a job with Ambrose. Busto could tell by the creaking of the stairs whether a man was carrying weight. He sat still, listening. He could identify you by the click and scrape of your key in the lock. Instinct told Busto that sooner or later Mr. Pym would come back.

  CHAPTER TWO

  PYM will never forget how he went downstairs that morning. The whole house was squealing Awake! Awake! Awake! For one mad minute he considered the possibility of sliding down the banisters, but he realised that in doing this he would make a strange noise. Be calm, he said to himself, remembering old stories of wild-beast trainers. Pym convinced himself that he was not in Busto’s house; it was a bad dream; he was a respected guest in a big hotel. He walked steadily downstairs. But as soon as he closed the street door behind him Pym ran away, braking down into a walk as he passed the policeman on the corner.

  He had fivepence to spend and four hours to kill.

  Pym went to Carnero’s café, which was open day and night, and sat inconspicuously in the corner behind the pin-and-marble machine, pretending to write notes on the back of an envelope. The waitress, Gina, found him in three minutes.

  “Sir?”

  “Oh, just a small white coffee,” said Pym.

  “Piccolo bianco-o-o-ooo!” cried Gina, whisking away dust and ashes with a red-edged cloth. Pym described a letter “W” on his envelope and paused, gnawing his pencil. Everyone else was eating. Gina was screaming orders over her shoulder.

  “… Scrambalegg-a-namm a rolla-butter potta-tea! … ’Am-sangwitch, jambon—twice—piccolo nero, one tea-a-a! … Christamighty, look sharp! Uno pair kippers, well do-oone! … One omblet, two eggs, and capucino! You dropped down dead down there? … Gord blood-and-water!—One ’ammanegg! ’Am, ’am! Egg, egg! One!—’Ammanegg, turned over, one slice cord Mary Jesus, once—a move on, cor Christianity! … Hey! —Troppo cotto, ’sto cutlet! Oh, Joseph Jesus Christ! Quick—uno pairo kippers, well do-o-one! … Piccolo bianco, piccolo nero, capucino-o-o-oo! … Gorgimme strenf, you got ruptured down there? Wake up, dreamy! Bubble ’n Squeak twice—two strong teas!”

  “One piccolo bianco,” said the waitress, banging down the little cup. “You gonna eat something? Sangwitch?”

  “No, thank you, Gina, I’m not hungry.”

  “What about a nice omblet?”

  “I don’t want an omelette, thanks. I’ve got a stomach-ache.”

  “What you want is a nice plate of minestrone.”

  “I don’t want a nice plate of minestrone. Thanks, all the same,” said Pym.

  Gina, the waitress, would not go away. She leaned over his shoulder, dusting the table, steadying herself with a big red hand on his shoulder. She said: “Ain’t you got nice hair? Is it naturally wavy?”

  “No. I go to my hairdresser every morning to have a perm and set—I’ve got nothing better to do. Didn’t you know that?” He was carefully smoothing out the wrinkles in his last cigarette. “If you want to get me something you might get me a light.”

  “You wanna box of matches?”

  “No; just a light.”

  “Ah-ha!” said Gina, “I get it.”

  “What do you mean—you get it? You get what?”

  “You broke, ain’t it?”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “Listen: you want to order something to eat and a packet of cigarettes, that’s all right. Pay another time.”

  Pym swallowed saliva, shook his head, and said: “Thanks, all the same, darling, I couldn’t touch a thing.”

  “Okay,” she said, and went back to the coffee-bar.

  Pym sat, drinking his coffee in tiny sips and carefully smoking his cigarette. He drew a figure five on the envelope, shaded it and embellished it; turned it into a banjo, and then into a round human face, upon which, hair by hair, he hung a luxuriant curly beard and cavalier moustache. The hat, an ornate Mexican sombrero, took him a long time: and then there had to be a little embroidered jacket. He was trying to outline his plans for the following day; but his plans had no outlines—they were wavering, amorphous, tenuous, smoky little things; the sort of vapours that arise when hope reaches melting point.

  He drew a poppy with a hairy stem. Having used up the back of the envelope he cut the edges with his coffee-spoon, folded it back, and tried to outline a clenched fist gripping a dagger, but he could not get the thumb right. So he shook his head gravely and drew a padlock. He had the air of a man who, after years of toil, finds himself on the verge of a masterpiece. Now, the name of Carnero on the glass door was black against a gold oblong of autumnal daylight.

  “Artist?” said a shy little voice. He looked up with a start. A small, slyly-smiling man in a shabby overcoat was sitting at his table. He, too, had sidled into an inconspicuous corner.

  “No,” said Pym, covering the paper with his hand. “No, I’m not an artist.”

  “You’ve got artistic hands,” said the shabby man. “I could have sworn you were a bit of an artist. Pardon the liberty.”

  “Not at all.”

  “In a very small way, I’m what you might call a bit of an artist myself. That’s why I took the liberty.”

  “A painter?”

  “A musician, sir, in a smallish kind of way. Yes, I’m a musician.”

  “Violinist?”

  “Well, no, not exactly a violinist. I perform on wind instruments.”

  “The flute?” said Pym, merely for the sake of talking.

  “Well, no, not exactly the flute,” said the other; “as a matter of fact, no, I don’t play the flute. But I did use to play the trumpet.”

  “Did you now!” said Pym, with an expression of awe. “And don’t you play the trumpet any more?”

  “Well … not exactly, no. I lost all my teeth, and that was the end of me as a trumpeter. And I had to give up the trumpet. As a matter of fact, I sold it when I lost my teeth. You have to change with the times.”

  “True, true. And what instrument do you play now, if I may ask?”

  The small shabby man took from his pocket a broken tin whistle and held it up for Pym’s inspection. “This is about all I can manage these days,” he said. “And look at it.”

  “It does seem to have got knocked about a bit, doesn’t it?”

  The little man put the whistle to his lips and blew. Nothing came out but a hiss and a squeak.

  “A great misfortune, sir. I was playing to the ladies and gentlemen at the Lyceum——”

  “At the Lyceum!”

  “Just outside. I was playing there this evening, and I’d just got started when somebody bumped into me and knocked it out of my hand, and somebody else trod on it. It cut my gum, too—look,” he said, opening his little chapped mouth and pointing. “People really are careless and inconsiderate. I said to the gentleman: ‘Now look what you’ve been and done, sir. This is my living, this is.’ You’d think in a case like that he would give you a shilling or two, wouldn’t you? Well, he didn’t give me anything at all—told me to look where I was going. I said to him: ‘In my opinion, sir, the boot is on the other foot.’ He just walked away without even saying he was sorry. What would you have done then?”

  “God knows. I haven’t the faintest idea.”

  “If I was versatile I could have sung a song, or done a little dance. And now I come to think of it, if I’d had any sense, I would have done as my wife told me.”

  “You have a wife?” asked Pym, incredulously.
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  “Oh yes. She said to me: ‘Why,’ she said, ‘you silly little fool, you! That was the time to go round with the hat and cry a bit and say look what they did to my instrument,’ she said. ‘But no,’ she said, ‘not you,’ she said, ‘you’re not a man you’re a little worm,’ she said; and I don’t blame her, either. ‘You get out of my sight,’ she said, ‘and don’t dare show your face inside this door until you bring the price of a bit of something to eat,’ she said; and she picked me up bodily and threw me out. I was too well brought up to raise my hand to a woman, sir,” said the little man sadly, contemplating a dirty fist remarkably like a chicken’s claw, “so I’ve been walking about all night. This morning I hope to pick up the price of a new whistle.”

  “How much do they cost?”

  “I can get one for eightpence,” said the little man, looking up hopefully and talking very fast. “I’m sure I could get one for eightpence or ninepence. If I had a couple of shillings I could get a new instrument and buy some sausages to take home, and then get an hour or two’s sleep and start again this evening like a lion refreshed, as the saying goes. If you could help me, I should be very grateful indeed. And I should be able to repay you in a day or so. You would probably be saving my life. I’m not a bit strong, and I don’t eat much, but the little I do eat is necessary to keep body and soul together, and——”

  Pym, writhing with embarrassment, said: “Look here, friend, excuse me just one moment. I’m very sorry indeed if I managed to convey that I was prosperous. I’m terribly sorry. But the fact of the matter is, I’m absolutely broke. That’s why you see me here at this hour of the morning. You see,” said Pym, in almost abject apology, “in a way I’m pretty much in the same boat myself. I’m a writer, you see—an author, and I’m in a similar kind of jam. You’ve got to get your tin whistle, and I’ve got to get my typewriter. I can’t get along without it: I can’t sing or dance, either. And what is more, I’ve got to pay my rent, because I’ve got to have somewhere to work. You see, I’m just finishing a book, and when I’ve finished it a publisher is going to give me fifty pounds advance for it. Do believe me; when I’ve paid for my coffee I shall have just about threepence in the world. You see my position? I wish I could do something for you, honest to God I do. But, I hate to say it—I can’t. I haven’t got anything.”