The Thousand Deaths of Mr Small Read online

  “Keep it!” he cried. “Let me not see it again!”

  “Coo, ta very much, Mr. Small!” she said, and took him at his word for once, On her next day off she carried it back to young Lygo, who, as luck would have it, knew an old lady who was looking for a phonograph of that sort, and whom he coaxed into buying it for three pounds, not a penny of which he kept for himself, although he was entitled to a little commission. Mollie went shopping and came home in a black straw hat wreathed in blue and yellow roses, a violet plush dress cut rather low at the neck, and high-heeled black-and-white boots; all picked up for next to nothing in a Ladies’ Wardrobe shop—a sinister establishment near Praed Street, where Paddington tarts, down on their luck, used to sell their spare finery. To make matters worse, she had got a soiled white umbrella with an ivorine handle and an astonishing necklace of huge orange-coloured beads which hung on her like a marigold garland on a sacred cow, and she had crammed her massive fists into white gloves striped with black over the knuckles. From her stiffly-bent left arm dangled one of those silly little things called a “Dorothy Bag”. There is no fun in being well dressed unless you can show yourself to people who appreciate nice things. Mollie showed herself to young Lygo, who at once invited her to go with him, at her earliest convenience, to a music hall. Then she let herself be seen by Mrs. Small.

  … Now, Charles Small starts telling himself that fundamentally his mother was of a sweet nature … twisted, like barley-sugar, but positively sweet. But on reflection he curses himself for a fool, for a lying fool, a foolish crook with a bit of grit in his conscience, trying to high-pressure himself into believing his own lies…. Sweet! Is this a recommendation? Of course she was sweet—sweet like sugar cane. Strip her, peel her, crush her, smash her between irresistible iron rollers, and from out of the splintered husk oozed sweetness, if you like—dirty, muddy, pulpy, sticky sweetness that spoiled your appetite for solid things—sweetness that rotted your teeth so that you writhed in torment until they were pulled out; when you fell back, a suckling babe again, limp and defenceless—to hell with such sweetness! Such sugar is symptomatic of disease, a pathognomonic sign pointing to coma and death. True sweetness, healthy sugar, is transmuted into energy and strength. This happens only when it does not stay sweet.

  Charles Small punches the pillow.

  If he lives a thousand years—and he feels that he has already lived five or six hundred—he will not forget what happened that day. His mother sweetly said: “Very smart, Mollie, very nice! What a pretty hat, and what lovely boots!” She said this in a half-bantering way; leaving a loophole through which she might wriggle if quoted, or overheard; only joking, of course, but giving the girl a few kind words, just to cheer her up. What had Mollie to look forward to, after all, the poor girl? Who was she, what was she? A nothing, a nobody, from nowhere. “What lovely boots! And those beads—where did you get them? Mm! Gloves too, eh? Somebody must have left you a fortune.”

  Then Mollie said, all in one eager breath: “You know that broken gramophone Mr. Small give me? That young man Lygo what works for Mr. Looby, ’e ment it for me, an’ when Mr. Small give it me I took it to ’im, an’ ’e took it to a party—she lives up Maida Vale—an’ she sez a pound, an’ ’e sez four, and she sez thirty shilling——”

  “—Hm!”

  “—She sez thirty shilling, mum, an’ ’e sez four-pun ten, and she sez two quid, an’ ’e sez four-pun, an’ she sez two-pun ten is my last offer, an’ ’e sez three-pun ten’s my last word if I was to drop dead this minute, and she sez three quid—take it or leave it. So ’e sez done, and that’s ’ow I got the money.”

  “Gramophones, eh?” said Mrs. Small; and suddenly an arctic cold filled the house, although it was sweltering in the July heat. “Gramophones. Very nice. Very nice!”

  His mother appeared to be curiously contented. She had the air of a theoretician who, let out of a lunatic asylum after twenty years of unjust incarceration, pinches the corners of his mouth and eyes into a knowing smile for the demoralisation of his apologetic persecutors.

  At supper time she said naïvely to her husband: “Oh, by the way, what happened to the gramophone?”

  The old man changed colour. His eyes flickered. He dropped his fork with a clatter, picked it up with a growl, blew his nose like a foghorn, made a knot of his eyebrows, and thundered: “Gremaphones, schmemaphones! Dancing, singing, they want already! Gremaphones!”

  “Where is it then?”

  “Where is it? A rubbish—where is it! Ask this bleddy little murderer!”—he threatened Charles Small with the crust of a slice of soft bread. “——You want gremaphones? Ask your, your, your, your little murderer! Gremaphones!”

  Charles Small knew that something dreadful was going to happen because his mother was speaking calmly, saying: “You threw it away?”

  “What did you want I should do with it?”

  “Well, it’s a pity. It could be somebody could have made use of it.”

  “Use of it, schmoose of it!”

  “To give thirty shillings, and then throw it away. All right. You’re the master. You know best.”

  Straining his lungs until the veins in his temples became blue, his father shouted: “Five shillings! Once and a thousand times for all, five! Five! FIVE!”

  “Listen. Srul! Why did you do it? What made you do it? What for?”

  “What, what for? What do you mean, why did I do it what for?”

  “Did I ever do anything to you?”

  “What does she mean, what? Do, do, do, schmoo, bloo! What do you mean, what?”

  “Srul, tell me the honest truth. Did—you—give—that—gramophone—to—that—girl?”

  “Girl?”

  “Yes, Srul. Girl.”

  “Leave me alone with your gremaphones!” the old man shouted, pounding the table with his fists. “Niggle, niggle, niggle—nag, nag, nag! Gremaphones!”

  The louder the old man bellowed, the more plainly he was defeated. The more emphatically he swore, the more obviously he was lying. Now he let out a yell that made the glasses dance on the sideboard, while the windows rattled and the house shivered, as he called upon God to strike him dead if what his wife said had the least grain of truth in it. He tore his hair, cried, brandished a fork, picked up a glass of water and put it down again; gripped the edge of the tablecloth as if to drag all the dishes down clattering to rack and ruin about his knees, at which his wife cried No!—so he tore a slice of bread to pieces instead. He brandished his fists over the head of his son, called him a “neglectful pig”—God knows where he had picked up that expression—and struck him with an envelope he had not dared to open because he knew that it enclosed a bill for water rates.

  “Can you look me straight in the face and tell me that you didn’t give that girl that gramophone?” she asked, when he paused for breath.

  “What do they take me for, what? A millionaire, I should give gremaphones? This piece of bread should choke me if I gave gremaphones!” His trembling hand found a bit of crust which he dramatically thrust into his mouth and tried to swallow but fear had dried his mouth, and the crust was dry too. So it choked him. Then the uproar was really terrible. He tore at his collar, knocked over his chair, and seemed to dance, while his wife threw her head back and screamed, until Mollie came running in from the kitchen with a glass of water. The old man drank, and the crust was washed down.

  “A nerrow escape!” he gasped.

  “You see? It serves you right—you shouldn’t swear false.”

  “False? May I——” he caught Mollie’s eye, winked, made a face, shook his head and said: “Mollie, I didn’t gave you no gremaphone, did I?”

  Mollie said: “Of course you did!”

  “Deliberate bleddy liar!”—deliberate was another word he had recently picked up and found a use for in every conversation—“deliberate bleddy liar! I told you to chuck it out—to chuck it out I deliberately told you!”

  “Chuck! Chuck!” said Mrs. Small, scandalised. �
�Who says chuck? Throw it out!”

  “Throw, schmow!”

  “You give it to me,” Mollie persisted. “After I got it ment you give it me, and Mr. Lygo sold it for me for three pound.”

  “She makes me out a liar? A liar she makes me out? Kick her out from the bleddy house!”

  “Oh, oright, I give a week’s notice. I may be in service but I’m not going to be made out to be a liar. I might as well be in Bedlam,” said Mollie, and stamped out of the room slamming the door.

  All that had been said that evening amounted to nothing more than a hurried, whispered outline of what was now to come. It was a mere tuning and warming-up of instruments. First, Charles Small’s mother turned to her son and said: “You see? A liar is always found out!” Then, rapping the table with a teaspoon, as a conductor raps the music-stand with a baton, she started the overture to a mad opera.

  Charles Small, in other, comparatively good-humoured periods of reminiscence, tells himself that if he could have been a musician, he might have got the inspiration for a terrible comedy out of that scene. He would have needed the London Symphony Orchestra, some bagpipes, the Mills Brothers, the Duncan Sisters, a dinner-gong, several bombardons, a fishwife, a sergeant-major, and a Cuban band complete with maracas and ass’s jawbones rattling with loose teeth. Technically, it would have been difficult to put over as it deserved. It would have been necessary to discover a pair of versatile geniuses who could sing down all other noises for three hours and forty minutes in duet, dancing at the same time. It would take Chaliapin, the Marx Brothers, and Henry Irving to play the part of Mr. Small. The Prima Donna, Mrs. Small, would have to be compounded of Sarah Bernhardt, Koringa (the lady sword-swallower), Dorothy Parker, Little Orphan Annie, Tillie The Toiler, Catherine de Medici, and Gertrude Stein.

  As for the libretto, he could write that himself:

  —You did, you did!

  —I did not!

  —Swear! Swear by your life!

  —I have swore! I swear by my life! See?

  —Hah!

  —You say Hah? I say Hah! Hah! What’s a joke?

  —Hum!

  —Speak or don’t speak! Don’t hum! Bleddywell——

  —Srul, Srul, not in front of the child!

  —What not in front from the bleddy child?

  —Don’t say “bleddy”, for God’s sake, Srul!

  —Don’t say “God”, then. Then I won’t say “bleddy”.

  —He’ll grow up with “bleddy” in his mouth.

  —Better the bleddy murderer should grow up with “bleddy” in his bleddy mouth, than “God”. God, schmod! Let him bleddy-well bleddy, the dirty rotten stinkpot!

  Mr. Small strikes his son on the head with envelope containing final demand for water rates.

  —For God’s sake, Srul, not on the head!

  —Beggar his bel-el-el-eddy head so he should know in future! Bleddywell beggar the bleddy beggar, so in future he should beggarwell bleddy know!

  —He’s gone mad, mad!

  —Mad, schmad! …

  —Srul, in England, speak English!

  —Hm! Nice bleddy English your bleddy father bleddywell spoked! Ha!

  —Spoked. Spoked! Spoked! I’m so ashamed I could kill myself.

  —She’s here with her killing! Murderer!

  —Foreigner!

  —Englisher!

  —Oh, I’m so ashamed, so ashamed, so ashamed!

  —Ashamed from what? From what ashamed? So from where did your father came from, where?

  —Come from! Not came from. In England, talk English.

  —From Samovarna, your father come from. Deny it!

  —And you, gramophones? Where did you come from? Cracow! A Galicianer! A Galicianer!

  —Is already a place, Cracow! Samovarna—phut!

  —Go to your Mollies. Go to your prostitutes. Finish!

  —I swear, I swear! I tell you I swear.

  —Liar.

  —I swore, Millie. Millie!

  —Sha! You’re not with Mollie now.

  —Who said Mollie? Who said?

  —You did, you did—deny it!

  —I did not! May I rot! May I die!

  —You swear?

  —I should drop——

  —Ssh!

  —She wants me to swear, so she shushes me! What for, why? I swear by my life I said Millie.

  —Mollie, you meant.

  —No!

  —You did, you did!

  Then it started all over again. Having thundered in the voice of Chaliapin in Ivan the Terrible, the old man, black in the face, opened big white hands and called upon his mammy in the voice of Al Jolson; while she, on Mimi’s deathbed, came up with a double-take, and went into a Desdemoniac frenzy, before she passed away in convulsions like Cleopatra. It went on into the small hours, breaking young Charles’s sleep. When he came down to breakfast at eight o’clock next morning his mother was red-eyed but triumphant. His father had gone downstairs sullenly to open the shop. He could not eat any breakfast; food would choke him; the sight of it would make him sick; he couldn’t touch a thing. Little Charles was worried, but he ate everything that was put before him. His mother refused to speak to Mollie, even to give her an order, so she sighed while she carried down a tray loaded with eggs, smoked haddock, hot rolls, and tea in her own martyred hands. The voice of the old man came up: “Take it away! Away! Didn’t I told you, I’m choked?”

  Yet between two sighs the plates were emptied.

  Charles went to school while his father, walking up and down the shop, waited for business.

  It is all very well, all very well, and all very funny, says Charles now, kicking his left foot with his right, all very fine and large. But damn my eyes, why didn’t I admit that it was I who broke the spring? For God’s sake, what was I afraid of?

  He is far from well. The bed rolls and the bedroom spins. The neat coils, nicely packed in his abdomen, are sliding loose. He winds them tighter with a tremendous effort. Still they slide. He throws his weight upon that which should control them, but there is a dull snap … and then he is hopelessly entangled in something blue, slippery, and interminable—struggling with his own guts.

  CHAPTER III

  HIS father called himself a “gentlemen’s hoser”. He never missed an opportunity of giving you one of his cards upon which, heavily printed in Old English type, was the inscription:

  M. & I. SMALL & SON

  Stylish Gents’ Hosiery

  9, Milk Street

  Grosvenor Street

  (Nr. Buckingham Palace)

  S.W.1.

  Thinking of this card Charles Small becomes alternately red with shame and white with anger, until his face feels like an electric sign. It was his mother’s idea, of course: who else could have thought of such a thing? Oh, that woman, that woman—if only he could get his hands on her throat, he would shake her as a terrier shakes a rat! He knew it all now: crumb by crumb, shard by shard, splinter by splinter he has picked up the bits and glued them together into something so nearly whole that he thinks he knows the shape, size, and pattern of it. And having stuck this rubbish together, what has he got? A lead-glazed, big-bellied, narrow-necked, crockery pot, neither useful nor decorative that had better not have been made. He wants to send it back to the dust with one savage kick.

  His father’s name was Yisroel Schmulowitz. He left Cracow in Galicia in the 1880s, before he was twenty years old, because he was about to be called up to serve his time in the Army. His mother, wailing and moaning, tearing to pieces her shaitel, had begged him to leave her and go, because in the Army he would associate with rough men and eat the flesh of dead swine. (A shaitel is a hideous wig, parted in the middle, which orthodox Jewesses, having shaved their heads, were supposed to wear after they were married in case they became appetising to strange men. Charles Small’s grandmother, at her best, could not have looked much more attractive than a plucked chicken. He had never seen her, but on the strength of a flattering photograph you
wanted to tie her up with a piece of thin twine and throw her into a pot of boiling water, the old fowl.) So Yisroel Schmulowitz ran for his life, and reached England with a few groschen in his pocket. He was not without a trade: he had been apprenticed to a bootmaker in some Cracovian suburb. A man named Noman, a philanthropist, picked him up and found him a job with a cobbler, for whom he sweated for several years, earning an honest living. He spent most of his money on clothes—cut-away coats, fancy waistcoats, tight patent-leather boots, spats, hats. Every Sunday he dressed himself up and walked in the park with his friend Schwartz. Twirling their moustaches and swinging their walking-sticks they strolled through Mayfair and Regent Street, where they made eyes at all the girls. Later, perhaps, they went to a music hall. Crime does not pay—murder will out. Charles’s mother had dragged out of her husband the scandalous story of the offering of a cup of cocoa to a loose gentlewoman, a “sport”. This beautiful anonymous one said that she thought him “quaint and charming”, and drank the cocoa with gusto. (The subsequent battle raged for three days, after which no cocoa was ever brought into the house. Once, when the old man employed an assistant named Cadbury, Mrs. Small screamed: “So you can’t get her out of your mind, is that what you are?”—so that Cadbury had to go.)

  The time came when a marriage broker told Yisroel Schmulowitz that he was good-looking, well-dressed, self-supporting, and marriageable, and that a beautiful young woman of good family was willing to look at him.

  “What’s she like?”

  “An Englisher gel—lovely!”

  “Dark? Fair?”

  “Medium.”

  “Tall? Short?”

  “Middling. What do you want? Jersey Lilies? Lily Lengtry? If I say a beautiful gel, it’s a beautiful gel. Look, see, and if you don’t like her, I’ll hang myself!”

  So he introduced young Schmulowitz to Millie, the least marriageable of six daughters. She was a screaming coquette. Four of her sisters were married, and she hated them with a bitter, deadly hate. Her unmarried sister had a queer leg, and she limped, so that Millie loved her. When Yisroel Schmulowitz came into the house, healthy and handsome and eminently presentable, Millie’s heart melted. She had five hundred pounds of dowry, and the young man had fallen in love with her. She made conditions. First and foremost, she could not marry a man who would impose upon her the name of Schmulowitz.