The Thousand Deaths of Mr Small

by Gerald Kersh

  “Go on, laugh. Now I know what he is—I kill myself for him and he laughs in my face.”

  “May I be—”

  “—Ssh! I’ve had trouble enough with this one all night while the drunkard was snoring away like a house on fire. What fork is that?”

  I. Small picked it up and turned it over saying: “Millie, so sure should I live, I don’t know.”

  “Appenrodt’s,” she said, reading the name stamped on the handle. “So that’s it. So now we know. He gets blind drunk and steals forks. He’ll end up in prison——”

  “—Forks, shmorks—to bleddy beggary miv forks, Millie! Tell me, no jokes—are you? Honest?”

  “Jokes? For him it’s a joke. They get all the pleasure; it’s the woman who pays,” said Millie, quoting one of the pithiest apophthegms of the heroine of Broken Hearts. “Go and steal forks!”

  “No, Millie, listen,” said I. Small, cautiously stroking her shoulder. “It would be nice, p’raps, this time a liddle girl?”

  “Girls. That’s all he thinks of. If you want girls you know where to find them. You don’t want my help.”

  “Millie, Millie, don’t be like that.”

  “Get away from me. Stealing forks. Any minute, now, we’ll have policemen in the house. Oh, I’ll be so ashamed!”

  “It was a … a … a accident, I made a mistake. What for do I want a fork, what for?”

  “Yes, that’s what he is. In Cracow they’d rather eat with their fingers, like uncivilised beasts.”

  “Who said fingers? What for would I steal forks? Isn’t there forks in the house, I should go steal forks?”

  “Forks in the house. That’s what they are. Give them half a dozen forks, and they think they’re rich. Go on as you’re going on, and you’ll see if you’ve got forks in the house. Drink them all away, go on, much I care!”

  “It was a misunder, a mistook!” cried I. Small, throwing the fork into the fire. Millie took it out with the tongs and said:

  “He steals forks to throw into the fire. A drunkard, a burglar, a madman—it’s all right, as long as I know what he is.”

  She wiped the fork carefully, saying something about catching diseases from it, and put it in a drawer. Later, she washed it in carbolic, boiled it, and used it in the kitchen. It was a very fine fork, made to last for ever. Sometimes it found its way on to the dining-room table. When Charles Small enquired how one of Appenrodt’s forks had come into the house, his mother shook her head and said: “Ask your father.” His father, brushing up his moustache with the knuckle of a forefinger, smiled enigmatically and said: “Ask your mother.” Young Charles used to dream of that fork: he liked to play with it when his mother was not looking. When she caught him, she took it away, and said cryptically: “That’s who he’s taking after. So that’s what he’s growing up to be.”

  Nearly fifteen years passed before Charles Small learned the history of the fork. Not once, in all those years, had I. Small dared to go out alone in the evening. Then Ruth fell ill. She lived in an elegant villa near Hove, where her husband, the estate agent, was supposed to be making money hand over fist, selling real estate in the neighbourhood of Roedean.

  One fine day in July Millie, who had gone out to exchange a few hateful pleasantries and sisterly acrimonies with Becky, came home, quaking with shock, and cried: “Srul! Srul! Quick!”

  “Millie, quick, tell me—what is it, what?”

  “Ruth!”

  “What’s the matter, quick!”

  “She’s been taken bad.”

  “What am I, a doctor already?”

  “Heartless. So that’s what you are.”

  “God forbid. But what is it?”

  “She’s been taken to a nursing-home to have her womb scraped.”

  “Oi!” said I. Small, grey with horror. “Scraped?”

  Charles Small was listening and he, too, was appalled. Scraped! He imagined Aunt Ruth’s womb as something like the bowl of a pipe, a choked tobacco pipe as big as a pumpkin, being decarbonised with hammers and chisels by men in dungaree overalls; while I. Small thought in terms of vices and shoemaker’s lasts gripped between hard knees, wooden-handled inward-cutting knives that seemed to beckon, and hoarse, coarse rasps—and his stomach turned

  “Scraped!” he said, “scraped!”

  “You see? Now, perhaps, you’ll appreciate.”

  “But … scraping! Scraping—oi!” He thought of knives on the surfaces of glazed plates, dentists’ instruments on teeth, files on iron. It was too much. He had to drink a glass of water.

  “I must go at once,” she said.

  “But why go at once, Millie? What can you do?”

  “You see, that’s what they are. What can I do, he wants to know? I can …”

  “Well?”

  “I can … Oh, what’s the use of talking to them? Isn’t she my sister? What should I do, let her lie there?”

  “What then? Pick her up? She’s in a nursing-home. So she’s not being looked after?”

  “By strangers. But what’s the use of talking if people are ignorant. She’s my sister!”

  “Then go.”

  “He’s quick to say go. He’s anxious to get rid of me. It’s quite all right.”

  “Then don’t go.”

  “I must go. God forbid, if anything happened, how would it look?”

  “Is anybody else going?”

  “Becky’s coming with.”

  “Scraped,” said I. Small, wincing at the thought. “Scraped! It makes you sick to think of it.”

  “Well, there you are. Men are selfish, what can you expect? That’s what comes of selfishness.”

  “Hm. Well, God forbid I should stop you going to your sister. I’d like to come, but what about the shop? And the expense? You go with Priscilla. I’ll stay here with Charlie.”

  “It’s not for my pleasure I’m going,” said Millie, defensively. “Only it’s my duty. Blood’s thicker than water.”

  I. Small nodded, and measured off half a yard of air in a gesture that seemed to say at least that much thicker; while his forehead wrinkled and his eyes half closed in an expression of intense spiritual anguish.

  “And the child needs a bit of fresh air, Srul. She’s not eating, she looks pasty. A girl of her age needs fresh air…. Don’t look so miserable, I’ll be back the day after to-morrow, please goodness.”

  “What must be, must be,” said I. Small, sighing, “only I want you should take care of yourself.”

  Then Millie became so friendly that her husband was almost sorry that she was going. She prepared cold chicken and laid out as much salad-stuff as two hungry men might consume in a week, together with tinned salmon, sardines, and stewed fruit. She gave her husband and her son instruction in the art and mystery of frying an egg, and explained in detail the means whereby a kettle of water may be brought to boiling point on a gas-stove so that (if one had the knack, and the experience) it might be poured over a handful of tea in a teapot to make a liquid which, served in a teacup and mixed with sugar and milk, might turn out to be a cup of tea…. This thing here was a bread knife; that thing there was known as a loaf. All you had to do was, put the edge of the knife—the sharp edge, not the blunt edge—on the loaf, and keep on cutting until a piece of the loaf fell away. Then you had a slice of bread. It was simple, if you knew how to do it. The spreading of butter she had not time to explain, since her sister was lying in bed being scraped; but in an emergency it was permissible simply to take a little butter on the end of a knife and smear it over the bread, to make the crude likeness of bread-and-butter….

  At last she went away with the girl Priscilla, and Charles Small was alone with his father for the first time in his life.

  At first they had little to say to each other. I. Small fidgeted uncomfortably, while his son moodily fingered the Westminster Gazette. At last the father said: “Well, Charley, what’s the latest?” When Charles told him that most of the news was of Lloyd George, President Wilson, and Clemenceau, he nodded
knowingly and said weightily, “Now there’s clever men, politicians. Take a lesson from them. Read the paper and … and … read the paper. A Welshman. But he worked his way up to be Prime Minister. See, Charley?”

  … Remembering this Charles Small understands, now, that his father, then, was trying to light the way to glory. And he thinks of a tired man before dawn, less than half awake, who has lost his bearings in his own bedroom, groping after a box of matches…. Somewhere in two thousand cubic feet of darkness there is a matchbox, and in that matchbox one last thin match. He gropes and fumbles, reaching for the light, until, having stumbled and hurt himself, he grows angry and rages impotently against the dark—the dark that keeps still and waits…. Charles Small understands this now.

  But then, when I. Small said: “He was a Welshman, but he wanted to be a somebody. So he studied for a solicitor and look at him now—Premier. The Premier is bigger than the King. You see? When Lloyd George was a bit of a boy, and his mother and his father said: ‘Lloydel, it’s already time to think of a trade’—d’you think he said: ‘Mummy, Daddy, I want to be Prime Minister?’ Don’t you believe it! He said: ‘I’ll learn a proper trade and take up the politics, p’raps, as a side-line.’”

  “Oh, stop it!”

  “Believe me, Charley, you’re young yet—you got to learn yet,” said I. Small. “You heard of Disraeli? Take a lesson from——”

  “Father, talk about something else,” said young Charles, screwing the Westminster Gazette in two, and throwing the twisted pieces on to the floor.

  Now if his mother had been present then there would have been trouble. She would have given his father a knowing look and said: “You see what he is? A madman! Who does he take after? Thank goodness he doesn’t get it from me.”

  Then I. Small, black with rage, would have shouted: “Who then from does he get it? From me?”

  So, like a couple of dabchicks hunting worms in a shallow, stagnant pond, Mr. and Mrs. Small would have scratched up mud until everything was black.

  Charles Small waited for something to happen. When his father said: “I mean for your good, Charley,” he ran to his room and lay on his bed in the twilight staring at the grey ceiling. A mouse scuffled in the wall. A fly droned. Several streets away a motor-horn honked insistently while a drunken woman laughed in the road below. There was a chinning and cooing and twittering of vulgar, dusty Cockney sparrows and pigeons settling down to sleep. “Dusk,” said young Charles, dramatically, “dusk….” Then he quoted:

  So be my passing!

  My task accomplished and the long day done,

  My wages taken, and in my heart

  Some late lark singing,

  Let me be gathered to the quiet west

  The sundown splendid and serene,

  Death …

  Then downstairs a chair fell over, a plate smashed, and I. Small’s voice reverberated through the house: “Dem bleddy beggary! Beggar you, you bandit! Murderer, come here at once! I’ll cut you to smidereens, I’ll break you off the legs!”

  “You can’t frighten me,” said young Charles, in a dramatic undertone. “Blow, rage, crack your cheeks! I defy you.”

  “I’ll murder you, you bleddy murderer!” cried I. Small, in a voice that shook flakes of plaster from the ceiling. “Wait. Wait there, I’ll get a knife. As long as I know what you are!”

  “‘There is no terror, Cassius, in your threats, for I am armed so strong in honesty they pass me by like the idle wind which I respect not’ … you old bluffer,” said young Charles.

  Then I. Small came upstairs, opened the bedroom door and whispered: “Charley, are you asleep? Yes or no?”

  “Yes.”

  “You shouldn’t read in the dark. It’s bad for the eyes to read if you can’t see to read.”

  Curling a contemptuous lip, the boy said: “If I can’t see to read, obviously, I can’t be reading.”

  I. Small lit the gas and Charles saw him standing under the gas bracket holding a plate of chicken. His left hand was tied up in a bloodstained handkerchief.

  “What’s the matter with your hand, Father? Did you cut it?”

  If Millie had been there I. Small would probably have told him to talk bleddy sense, arguing at the top of his voice that if he had not cut his hand it wouldn’t be bleeding. But now, in the tones of an ordinary human being, he said: “It’s nothing, Charley. That bleddy fowl. The knife was blunt, so it slipped, so I got a proper knife and cut it up. I cut it up all right! You wait and see. Go on, Charley, eat something. Eat, grow, go on—eat it all up.”

  “But you cut yourself, you’re bleeding.”

  “Take no notice—eat, Charley. A cut here, a cut there, what’s the difference? All my life I been cutting myself.”

  As his father said this an invisible hand came out of the shadows, took young Charles by the throat, and shook a sob out of him. He turned to the wall to hide his face.

  ‘Charley, what is it now? Tell me, now what did I say wrong? Now what did I do?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Charley, it’s a terrible thing you should be like this—terrible!” I. Small, exploring his imagination for consolatory words, felt as he had felt one day in a tramcar, when the conductor punched his ticket and he remembered that he had left his purse in his other trousers and sat stammering, wordless, penniless, burning with shame. “Go on, Charley, eat up. To-morrow is also a day.”

  “To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death…. I couldn’t touch a thing.”

  “Believe me, Charley, everything is for the best,” said I. Small, unhappily, “and … and … and what is done is done, believe me!”

  “Father, please leave me alone,” said young Charles, burying his face in his pillow.

  He felt something warm on the nape of his neck and caught a whiff of tobacco. His father must have kissed the back of his head.

  Later, when I. Small’s heavy footsteps died away and the bedsprings cried themselves to sleep in the bedroom below, he sat up and considered the chicken and bread-and-butter on the table. The fowl was neatly but unconventionally carved. On the left-hand side of the plate lay the Appenrodt fork; on the right, a cobbler’s knife. This struck young Charles as humorous. He thought of the old man throwing down the blunt carver, taking up the tool to which he was accustomed, sitting on a hard chair in the kitchen and shaping a cold chicken which he was gripping between his knees. The thought made him laugh. There was a spot of blood on the gold rim of the plate. He wiped it off with a bit of crust; ate heartily, turned out the light and slept dreamlessly.

  Next day, when he had carried the plate down to the kitchen, and they were eating burnt and broken fried eggs and drinking underdone tea, he said: “Come on, Father, tell me—as man to man, where did you get that fork?”

  It was Sunday morning, and I. Small was in a carefree mood. He was wearing his best clothes, his lowest collar, and his gayest tie. His eyes were bright; a certain cheerful contraction of the muscles in his face had sent his coppery moustache springing up in a fine curve, so that you felt that if you plucked at it it would give out a resonant golden twanging note.

  He laughed, and said: “Aha, boychik—swear not never to say a word, and I might p’raps tell you. It was when I was young and foolish. Thank God I know better now. It was when you was a child in arms, Charley … Oi, was that a night! I’m lucky I’m here now alive to tell the tale. The madness you get up to, when you’re young and don’t know no better! There was nearly Scotland Yard detectives in the house. Your mother, bless her, she doesn’t like to think of it—and quite right too. It was something terrible, Charley, I tell you. To tell you the honest truth, then I was wild like a wild beast, like a mad dog, like … like a lion in the zoo. I was young, Charley, foolish. I was uneducated. You’ve got an education, so there’s no need you should be a madman like I was. Oi, what we got up to!”

 
; “Go on, tell me.”

  “P’raps I better not.”

  Charles Small, sixteen and a half years old, said: “Oh, come on, Father—man to man—tell us.”

  If Millie had been present then, I. Small would have thundered: “Man to man? What, so he’s a man already, that schnip? The bleddy cheek of it! Let them learn to wipe their noses before they call themselves men!”

  But now the phrase pleased him. He gave his son a suggestive, intimate dig in the ribs, and told him in fantastic detail the history of Appenrodt’s fork. Into this history he threw all he had ever heard of high life and dissipation. The story started somewhat sheepishly:

  “… Well, as man to man, it was nothing much. It was nothing much, as man to man …” Seeing that his son looked disappointed, I. Small scoured the stockpot of imagination and scraped the bones of fancy. In a solemn, dramatic voice, he went on: “Me and my friend Mr. Schwartz, We went one night to the Criterion. You, Charley, you were not born or thought of. Well, born, yes. Thought of, you wasn’t. No, wait a minute—I didn’t had your education—you was thought of, day and night. That was the days! So Mr. Schwartz and me, we went to the Criterion, in Piccadilly. And you should have seen who was there!” I. Small pursed his lips and whistled. “… Actors, with actresses, artists, gentlemen, designers, politicians, lords and ladies, Rothschild, everybody you can think of. Do you hear, Charley? Boxers, Hackenschmidt, T. E. Dunville, dukes, duchesses everybody!”

  “As man to man, Father, was Mother there?”

  “As man to man, Charley, no. Your mother, bless her, was at home with you, because you was a baby in arms. You wasn’t born or thought of, practically. You was a backward child. You was still teeding—day and night you screamed murder with your teet. They wouldn’t come out from your gunks, Charley. It wasn’t your fault, it was your misfortune. Your poor mother——”

  “I’ve heard all that before about ten thousand times, Father. Go on about the fork.”

  “This should be a lesson to you, Charley,” said I. Small, solemnly. Then he proceeded to give an account of that unforgettable evening. He suggested that he and Solly Schwartz had practically sacked the West End of London, leaving no window unbroken and no maiden unravished. He exposed himself as a drink-crazed hooligan abominably devoid of conscience—a sort of Mohock who had gone roaring and ravaging from the Criterion to the Quadrant and back again, scattering torn-up policemen in his wake as a runner in a paper-chase scatters paper. Maddened with liquor he had destroyed restaurants, uprooted lamp-posts, whistled after girls and made a perfect beast of himself. He made it clear that if the mounted police had not been called out he might have put an end once and for all to law and order. But luckily for him, seventeen or eighteen strong men subdued him. They may or may not have tied him with ropes—these details slip out of memory.