The Thousand Deaths of Mr Small

by Gerald Kersh

  “Where should I get a machine, where?”

  “Marry and get a few hundred pounds and get credit and be a man!”

  I. Small, as he had begun to call himself, was thinking of all this when his English ran through his fingers. Millie and all her family spoke fluent Yiddish, but he would have been ashamed to slip back into the jargon. Millie whispered: “Be quiet. Do you want to make a poppy-show of me?” Then Nathan, the Photographer, continued:

  “Let’s look on this side of it. Say I’m in the boot and shoe repairing business. Right? I bang away and sweat, I sew, I work myself like a fool and knock my guts out for an hour … what for? A couple of shillings. Still, all the same if my business is boots and shoes, it should be boots and shoes. Now look on this side of it. I take premises. I go to a wholesaler and I take a line of goods, gents’ boots and shoes, that I pay eight shillings a pair for. In five minutes I sell a pair of gents’ boots and shoes for ten-and-six. In five minutes I’ve made half a crown, and at the same time I walk up and down in a coat and I’m a somebody, a mensch, a man! If I sell a pair of boots for two-and-six profit every five minutes for ten hours I’ve made thirty shillings an hour. Thirty shillings an hour is fifteen pounds a day. Fifteen pounds a day, five and a half days a week … well, to be on the safe side call it twelve pounds a day five days a week, that makes sixty pounds a week clear profit. And you’re a gentleman. You come, you go. That’s better than banging and banging with your mouth full of nails—sixty pounds a week clear profit. The thing to do, in this life, is let other people do the dirty work. Give them a living wage, yes. But what for bang your guts out? Do I make myself clear?”

  “It’s a trade. It is an honest living,” Small persisted stubbornly.

  “Certainly it’s a trade, an honest living,” said Nathan, the Photographer, suavely. “So is sweeping the streets. So is being a dustman an honest living. A navvy makes an honest living. A chimney-sweep makes an honest living. Agreed, Schmulowitz!”

  “Small,” said Millie.

  “—I beg your pardon, Small. But you’re young, you’re inexperienced, and if you don’t mind my saying so, you don’t realise that you’re marrying a well-brought-up girl from a nice family. You’ve got to give her the … the surroundings”—he was proud of this word, and said it again, rolling it on his tongue—“the surroundings she’s used to. A friend pops in for a cup of tea. What does she see? She sees you sitting in an apron, with your sleeves rolled up klupping hobnails into some toe-rag’s boot. Ask yourself, Small, ask yourself a question—how would you like it?”

  At this point Millie’s feelings—whatever they were; she Was full of woe-begetting “feelings”—burst into tears and said: “For my sake! For my sake! To please me!”

  All the English had been washed out of his memory by this torrent of eloquence and flood of tears: groping and scrabbling in the wash for a few words, I. Small stammered but said nothing. He was ashamed to break into Yiddish in the presence of Millie’s sisters.

  Nathan the Photographer, who was a man of intuition, sensed this and said, in fluent Yiddish with a strong Ukrainian accent that made Becky giggle (whereupon Lily bit her lips and stored up another grudge): “Srulka, how much do you make?”

  I. Small said, excitedly: “Tree pound a veek!”

  “For a single man it’s a very good wage. A single man can live on twenty-five shillings. I pay my assistant—my assistant, mind you—thirty shillings. But circumstances alter cases. Now look. Listen to me just for a minute, and take advice from a fool.”

  Nathan, the Photographer, paused, and I. Small nodded, deeply impressed. In this family there were two infallible formulæ by the application of which it was possible to compel anyone, however distantly related, to do something foolish. Formula One, the Feminine Formula, was: Do it, do it to please me. Just to PLEASE ME do it! Formula Two, nearly irresistible, consisted in five words spoken in a plaintive voice after a violent quarrel: Take advice from a fool. If one said: “I will not do this, that, or the other, against my inclination, to please you or anyone else,” the woman had grounds for hysterical recrimination and the exhumation of dead and rotten scandals and martyrdoms for a period of three to six months.

  If, in the other case, one asked: “Why should I take advice from a fool?” Or said: “If you insist that you are a fool, who are you to tell me what to do?” up popped the devil.

  The lover of peace, in the family, did violence to all his feelings if someone said: “To please me, do something that you’d die rather than do,” or: “Take advice from a fool—don’t do what you’ve always wanted to do.”

  Nathan, the Photographer, said: “Take advice from a fool. There’s a few hundred pounds. Find a place in a good position and go into business. Do you want to be a schuster all your life?”

  The company nodded, groaning. A schuster is a man who works with shoes; and this, they thought, was a very degraded thing to be.

  I. Small shook his head. The estate agent laughed, “Ha-ha,” so contemptuously that Millie got his face in focus through a couple of eyefuls of tears, and put into cold storage a little vitriolic something to throw into his eyes one of these days when he might be off his guard.

  “It’s as good as nailing up boards outside dirty old empty houses!” she cried.

  “I’d rather deal in property than stick my nose into every Tom Dick and Harry’s great big ferschtinkener feet!” said Ruth.

  This was not well found: Ruth had big feet. Millie said: “Look who’s talking about feet! Who takes size seven?”

  “My feet she throws into my face! I know certain people who’d take size eight, if they didn’t go about like Chinamen, all squeezed up! I’d rather have big feet than bite my nails!”

  All the Moss girls had big feet, but Sarah’s feet were biggest, and her husband the tobacconist bit his nails. He was a passionate nail-biter. He bit his nails as a drunkard drinks, so that he went in for secretive economies. He exercised a sort of self-indulgent self-control, like a terrified alcoholic who keeps an inch or two of gin in the bottle overnight to keep him going until the bars open next day. He bit nine of his finger-nails until they bled, making them last until Sunday morning. But he never touched the nail on the little finger of his left hand: this was his cellar, his secret hoard, his plantation. In six days it grew an eighth of an inch. He hurried through breakfast on Sunday morning and then locked himself into the sitting-room with the News of the World and, with a shudder of ecstasy, nibbled off the first sliver.

  Pearl shouted: “Sha! Sha!” To I. Small she said graciously: “Sisterly love. It’s only sisterly love.”

  “I don’t know, what’s the matter with a shoemaker?” said Becky, in her leering, sneering way.

  I. Small nodded, smiling at her, and said: “Qvidel right! What’s the matter, what?”—at which old Mr. Moss felt his beard and looked at Becky through half closed-eyes. Becky had a nose like a squashed pear and irregular eyes. Her ears were set at odd angles. She would have married anything that wore trousers. But as soon as she had said what she said Millie wept again.

  Then the tobacconist shouted: “Whose nails are they? Do I ask you for nails? Do I bite your nails? If it isn’t one thing it’s another. Now it’s nails! What d’you want me to bite, screws? Mind your own business! I’ll bite what I bloomingwell like! Leave me alone!”

  Ruth shrieked at her husband: “You let a creature like that talk to me like that? And you call yourself a man?”

  The estate agent, half-heartedly, said: “Talk like a gentleman!”

  The tobacconist cried: “First teach your wife to talk like a lady.”

  “So now I’m not a lady,” said Ruth, in tears. “If I was a man I’d tear him to pieces.”

  Then the estate agent rose abruptly, knocking over his chair, and said: “I didn’t come here to be insulted. I wish you good-night.” He started to leave the room, but his wife clung to his coat-tails, sobbing:

  “Stay, stay!”

  “Stay to be insulted?�
�

  “To please me—for my sake!”

  “Let us be quiet,” said the photographer.

  “You see what you’ve done?” said Millie to her fiancé, “do you see? Now do you see what you’ve done?”

  I. Small, taking himself by the ears and shaking himself, shouted: “I didn’t done nothing, I didn’t said a word! Let it be a boot and shoe shop, a shmoot and boo shop—for the sake of peace, anything!”

  So at last it was decided that I. Small was to become a retailer of footwear. There were passionate arguments about suitable premises. The photographer suggested one of the expanding north-western suburbs. Millie took this as a slight. Having listened, nodding in agreement, until the photographer was gone, she foamed at the mouth with resentment….

  So! Now she knew. She knew it all now. He was jealous already, that twopenny-halfpenny photographer—he wanted the West End of London all to himself, the glutton! So that was the kind of man he was: thank God she had found out at last! She tore a handkerchief and cried. So that was the idea, was it? To get them out of the way. Just because he talked good English, he was ashamed of his future brother-in-law. So that was it, was it? Who was he to be stuck up just because he was a photographer—all he had to do was put a bit of black cloth over his head and say: “Smile please,” or “Look at the dicky bird.” Him and his dicky birds—he looked down on her Intended because he was a high-class shoemaker, did he? What was the matter with a shoemaker, anyway? A high-class shoemaker was as good as a photographer any day, in fact twenty times better than certain photographers she could mention. In any case, I. Small was not a shoemaker—he was in ladies’ and gentlemen’s shoes…. But everybody wanted to get them out into the suburbs, that was it…. Millie carried on in this vein until her father drove his clenched fist into a soup tureen full of hot borsch and screamed like a maddened horse in a burning stable, saying: “I want you should be calm!”

  In the end she set her heart on business premises with an upper part in a side street off Oxford Street. (The place the photographer had suggested was in Golders Green. He bought it himself, freehold, for £300 and sold it twenty years later for £7,350—which made Millie’s blood boil again.) But at present, at least, she could say that her husband was in the ladies’ and gentlemen’s boot and shoe business in the heart of the West End. Mayfair! From Oxford Circus you turned westward, walked three hundred and fifty yards, turned left, walked four hundred yards, crossed the street, took the turning by the antique shop, and there was I. Small’s establishment, in Mayfair—a five minutes’ walk from Park Lane.

  Charles Small, who has inherited a tendency to sit on tacks to give himself something to cry over, walked one evening to look at that shop in Noblett Street, W.1. Of all the streets in London this was the least frequented. It had no right to call itself a thoroughfare. There was no earthly reason why any human being should ever set foot in it. Noblett Street was an unnecessary street, a sort of dried-up fjord, ominously quiet. The motor horns in Oxford Street sounded half a mile and a hundred years away. It was the sort of street to which a misanthropic Londoner might retire in the twilight of his life, to brood in woolly silence, out of the sight of mankind. There he could walk up and down of an afternoon, and be certain that he would not encounter any living creature, except cats. To borrow an image of James Thurber’s, Noblett Street had cats as other places have mice—the cats knew that no one would disturb them here. They wooed their mates in the open road and had honeymoons in the doorways, while bloated, verminous pigeons cooed and strutted in the gutters with such smug self-satisfaction that you wanted to cuff their heads. Noblett Street was full of empty peace. It had had enough of life, and settled down to a well-earned rest—it could never have amounted to anything in any case. Once in a while an old beggar-woman who picked rags out of the dustbins and lived on potato peelings, kipper bones, the residual juice in salmon tins, and orange peel went there to relieve herself. In Noblett Street, even at high noon, she was assured of privacy. If there had been any people worth mentioning living in it, even if they had had nothing better to do than loaf on their thresholds, it would not have been so bad. But when Charles Small visited Noblett Street it was dead and derelict. There were only eight shops and outside seven of them hung agents’ boards saying To Let or For Sale. The only open shop was described as a “Pets’ Beauty Parlour”. He glanced inside and saw a lumpy-faced woman parting the hair of a petulant Yorkshire terrier—probably her first customer in weeks, and a discontented one at that, to judge by the sound of its voice.

  The houses on the other side of the street were being demolished to make room for a block of flats. Work was finished for the day, but a miasmatic haze of dirty dust still hung in the foul air over the ruins. The standing brickwork looked so rotten that Charles Small would not have been much surprised if someone told him that the workmen were pushing the houses down with their shoulders. Trust his mother to pick on a street like this—oh, trust her! Mayfair! He spat, partly in anger, and partly because his mouth was full of dust.

  There was a gloomy little pub, “The Noblett Arms”, on the far corner. Charles Small’s curiosity was something like the gnawing hunger of a dyspeptic who must indulge his craving for sour pickles although he knows that there will be the devil to pay. He went into The Private Bar, where an aged man looked up from last Sunday’s newspaper and stared, round-eyed with hope, until Charles Small ordered a shandy—a mixture of ginger-beer and mild ale that used to cost threepence. Obviously, the landlord, seeing a well-dressed gentleman, expected to get rid of at least tenpennyworth of brandy. Mowing and gibbering, and looking as if he was about to bite him, he squirted a little ale from a beer engine that creaked and groaned at being awakened out of a long sleep; wrung the neck of a ginger-beer bottle; filled the glass and pushed it across the bar with a snarl. Charles Small said: “Will you take something yourself?”

  “Drop of brandy.”

  Putting down a ten-shilling note he said: “Help yourself.”

  “Haven’t you got nothing smaller? Where d’you suppose I’m going to get change? It’s one-and-four. Haven’t you got one-and-four?”

  “Here’s one-and-four…. Is your clock right?”

  “It wouldn’t be ’ere if it was,” said the publican.

  “Have you been here long?”

  “A bloody sight too long.”

  “May I ask how long?”

  “Thirty years. Thirty years too long.”

  “Business good?”

  “It looks like it, don’t it?”

  “Well, good health!” said Charles Small, sipping his shandy, while the landlord snorted and swallowed his brandy…. “You say you’ve been here thirty years. I wonder if, by any chance, you remember some people called … let me see … yes, Small, that’s it, Small, who used to have a shoe shop in this street?”

  At this the muscles twitched in the landlord’s face—he was trying to smile, but he had lost the knack. While his face was twitching and quivering, he blew air through his nostrils; he was laughing. Then he said: “Shoe shop? I remember them. They came here and opened a shoe shop. They must have been off their heads. They didn’t last five minutes. They went broke in no time. That’s how it is with them Jews, here to-day, gone to-morrow. Give ’em an inch and they’ll take a yard. It’s your money they want. That’s how they rule the world. What’s the idea of a boot shop in Noblett Street? If you want my opinion, there was dirty work going on somewhere. Boot shop! I’m too old a bird to be caught with chaff. There was more in that than meets the eye, but I never got to the bottom of it….”

  CHAPTER V

  THEY put the Noblett Street shop in order. Millie wanted it painted white. Why? Because white was a nice clean colour. The estate agent suggested varnished brown, grained to look like walnut. But Millie insisted that white was the only respectable paint. One speck of dust, on white paint, showed up like a fly in a glass of milk, so that if a woman kept the place clean (she looked sideways at Lily) there was no question a
bout it. Who went in for brown paint? What sort of a colour was brown? White!

  So the woodwork was painted white. The shop was fitted and stocked. The family called a secret conference and it was agreed that everyone should buy a pair of boots or shoes from the Smalls of Mayfair, if only to give them a little encouragement. Sisters, brothers-in-law, uncles and cousins came and bought boots, shoes, dancing pumps and slippers. Millie insisted on their paying no more than the wholesale price. It looked bad, she said, to make money out of your own flesh and blood. So they emptied eighteen shiny oblong boxes in the first week—at cost price. After that business fell flat. Millie, who had large ideas, and had conversed with people who had brains, knew something of the strategy of modern commerce. She said: “We must advertise!”

  “What advertise? Where advertise?”

  “What’s the use of talking? Oh, what’s the use?”

  “Then don’t talk!”

  “So now he wants to shut me up! What marvels have you done? … Advertise! For God’s sake, advertise!”

  They bought six lines of space in a local newspaper. Nothing happened.

  “Ha! A bargain we got!” said I. Small, angry but satisfied.

  “Then send out circulars!”

  “Who to?”

  “What’s the use of talking if he’s ignorant?” cried Charles Small’s mother. (She and her husband had already acquired the habit of quarrelling in apostrophe.) “Send out letters. Who to, he says. Everybody!”

  “Go on then, send out letters, send! To everybody send letters. Na—Nadir a pen, nadir a bottle ink—go on, to everybody write letters, quick! Tell them they should come at once, quick!”

  “What’s the use of talking to him? He’s ignorant.”

  “What does she mean, he’s ignorant?”

  “You’re ignorant!”

  “All right. Take the pen, take the ink, write letters to everybody. Go on, educated woman, schreib! Write!”

  Yes, the business was a failure, and Millie was ashamed. They were in debt, and after the next quarter’s rent had been paid there would be less than two hundred pounds in the bank.