The Thousand Deaths of Mr Small

by Gerald Kersh

  “Oh well, yes, I think I can do that. In how many colours?”

  “Green! How many colours is a pea? As many colours as you like—the more the merrier—only I want those peas to look like peas, to look like they’re just coming out of that pod on the end of your thumb. Never mind colours, do it! And can you do me another label, the same, with tomatoes?”

  “Oh yes—they’re lovely things, tomatoes. I love them.”

  “Who doesn’t? Imagine—you come home from school hungry and your mother’s making fresh tomato soup with fresh tomatoes, with a little bit of rice in it, eh?” Solly Schwartz, overcome by the memory of it, mopped up egg yolk with a bit of bread, and swallowed noisily; but his eloquence was such that Abel Abelard, whose diet, between ten and seventeen, had consisted in stew and pudding at a great public school, felt hungry for green peas in chicken broth and clear tomato soup with a few grains of rice in it.

  “Well, yes,” he said, “but is this a commission, or only a suggestion?”

  “Now look here. You paint me up three good labels, to fit this tin—you know the lettering. I want—one for garden peas, one for tomatoes, and one for—” Solly Schwartz thought for a moment, striking his iron foot with his stick, and then cried—“Chicken soup! Think of a lovely fat juicy fowl, and a bowl, a lovely bowl full of chicken soup that looks like gold, with a few garden peas floating in it. Think of that! Do me those three labels, by tomorrow this time, and I’ll pay you well.”

  “Could you pay me a little something as it were in advance?”

  Solly Schwartz’s hand went to his pocket. He knew that Abel Abelard was hungry, and something told him that the hungrier he was the more passion he would put into his peas, tomatoes, and chicken soup. So he put down five shillings and said: “This’ll tide you over till to-morrow. You let me have those labels by five o’clock to-morrow afternoon, and I’ll pay you a pound apiece for them. Is that fair?”

  “Well, I’m agreeable,” said Abel Abelard.

  “I don’t have to tell a man of your education what peas and tomatoes look like, but have you got that chicken soup clear in your mind? It’s a sort of golden colour—think of melted butter—and in it there’s these little fresh peas, and little tiny square bits of farfel. You keep on thinking of it and make me a nice picture with good gold lettering for the label. When I say gold, remember, I don’t mean that sort of gold they paint picture frames with, I mean——”

  “—Oh, don’t! I know, I know. Hadn’t I better take this tin of peas for the measurement?”

  “Certainly, take it.”

  “By the way, will you want it back?”

  “All I want is them labels.”

  “You see, all of a sudden I’ve developed a terrific appetite for green peas. I’ll be here by half-past four to-morrow afternoon. Thank you very, very much. À demain.”

  When he was gone Solly Schwartz paid the bill and went out of the café, saying to himself: My God, what a marvellous salesman I am! I’ve sold myself chicken soup! And he walked as fast as he could to Fishbone’s kosher restaurant in Charing Cross Road. There, impatiently beating his iron foot, he waited while a waiter shouted down the shaft: “Von beef vid kasha for a special customer—and der gentleman says dis time it should not smell from herring!”

  Then Solly Schwartz caught him by the coat-tails and said: “C’mere—quick, I’m in a hurry! Have you got chicken soup with a few fresh peas in it, and a little farfel?”

  “All your life you should have chicken zoop like ve got chicken zoop,” said the waiter.

  Solly Schwartz had to swallow a mouthful of saliva before he could say: “Listen. I want a big plate, a great big plate—it had better be a little tureen—with chicken soup, with fresh peas, with a little farfel, the leg quarter of a boiled chicken, and matzo-balls. Quick, I’m in a hurry.”

  “A leg quarter special boiled chicken in special chicken zoop mit matzo-balls mit fresh peas mit special farfel for a special customer!” shouted the waiter.

  Solly Schwartz sat and waited, remembering this dish as his mother used to make it. But when, at last, he was served, the soup was insipid and the chicken boiled to rags. As for the matzo-balls: he bit one, spat out the mouthful with a hideous grimace, picked another out of the bowl with his fingers and flipped it at the waiter’s head, as a boy flips a marble, snarling: “You should shoot this scheiss out of guns. And what do you call this? Soup? And what do you call this, chicken? Ducks should be swimming in such soup—under Westminster Bridge there’s better soup. And you call these fresh peas? Eh? They come out of a dirty stinking tin. Don’t argue, because you’re wrong—don’t tell me, I know. This is the last time I patronise this restaurant.”

  “Vat do you vant from me? I’m der vaiter, not der cook.”

  “Oh, go away,” said Solly Schwartz. He ate his soup and his chicken angrily. He was disenchanted: he had been thinking of the Friday evening meals as his mother prepared them; and thinking of them, even while he was chasing the last elusive drop of gravy around the plate with the last bit of bread, although his belly was full his mouth watered, and he said to himself: Perhaps, after all, it’s a bit of a pity she died. That chicken soup with farfel and peas took a bit of beating.

  (If, just then, someone had offered him a spoonful of the late Mrs. Schwartz’s chicken soup, he would have spat it out in a fine spray and called nostalgically for the chicken soup that mother used to make. Mrs. Schwartz was an execrable cook. Solly’s yearning was not for her watery, greasy soup: it was for a certain lost second. When he was eleven years old a newsagent and tobacconist paid him half a crown a week for his services as errand boy between four and seven o’clock five evenings a week. He learned to love Friday: it was the last day of school, the last day of labour, it was pay day. One awful Friday afternoon in November a black fog came down—an icy cold, wet fog that penetrated clothes and skin as water gets into blotting-paper—and in this fog the boy Schwartz was lost. He had one small parcel of papers and periodicals to deliver, but he took the wrong turning and then, when the fog came down he found that he was blind as well as halt and lame, and so he pressed his head against some wet and freezing area railings and, as quietly as he could, for even then he had his pride, cried. Then there were footsteps that seemed to shake the street—whatever street it was—and there was a flash of golden light that concentrated itself into a circle. He found himself looking into a policeman’s lantern. A gruff, foggy voice said: “Cheer up, you’ll soon be dead. What you crying for? You lost?” The beam of light moved slowly downwards, and shone upon the boy’s iron foot. “Oh, ah,” said the policeman, hooking his lantern on his belt, “up you get, come on. Now, where were you supposed to be going? … What for? … What, to deliver them, eh? Never mind about that. Where d’you live? … Oh there, I know: third left, first right, first left again. Come on, son, have a ride home. Hang on, and I’ll give you a picky-back…. Don’t worry about your papers. It’s on my beat, and I’ll deliver ’em for you. You come on home, my boy.”

  The policeman put him down outside the tenement in which he lived, and gave him two copper pennies. Solly Schwartz heard him say: “If the Sergeant is about, the odds are he’ll never …” Then the big, iron-heeled boots clattered away in a hurry, and Solly Schwartz went upstairs. His parents were waiting for him. For once, his father was pleased to see him, and called him by endearing diminutives. They had thought that he had been run over in the fog. There was boiled chicken in soup, farfel, matzo-balls, and peas. They could not, of course, have been fresh peas, but they were delicious. They loaded his plate. Mr. Schwartz pulled a wing from his portion of chicken and gave it to him with a friendly smile. It was the happiest evening of Solly Schwartz’s life. The chicken wing was scrawny and tough. But in the second that it took to tear it loose and offer it in that little warm, bright kitchen bolted and barred against the cold, the wet woolly fog, and the terrors of the night—in that second there was born a glory and a dream…. For that one second Solly Schwartz was happy.
But only for that one second.)

  *

  He paid the bill, gave the waiter sixpence, and went back to Anselmi, hugging his parcel of tin cans. He was sad and angry. “Here they are,” he said, “and I want the job done quick. Before you start, put them in warm water and get those labels off. Keep the labels, I want those labels. How soon can I get ’em?”

  “I’m a liddle-a bit slack now, so two, two-three days.”

  “The day after to-morrow, you mean.”

  “Oright, day after to-morrow. But-a listen—I gotta open dem tins. What I do with dem peas?”

  “Keep ’em, damn ’em—I hate the sight of ’em—I never want to see another pea as long as I live,” said Solly Schwartz.

  When he was gone Anselmi, turning the tin can in his hands, shook his head, smiled pitifully, and said: “Ma tu, che capisci, gobbo?”—Which means “You, what do you understand, hunchback?” But he said it in sorrow, not with malevolence.

  Abel Abelard went back to his poor little bare studio in Fitzroy Square, where he stood for a long time gazing lovingly at his immense unfinished picture of the burning of the library at Alexandria. Like Haydon, he conceived his pictures on a huge scale. If the studio had been big enough to hold it, his canvas would have been 32 by 16 feet. He picked off a fly that had got stuck in the wet paint on the tip of a Mohammedan warrior’s nose, dashed it to the floor and trampled it to death. His lady friend, his mimi, a cheerful slattern with a snub nose and tousled hair, came in and said: “Any luck, duck?”

  “Well, I’ve got five shillings, and if I can turn out some labels for this tin can I can get three pounds. But now that I come to think of it, I don’t see how I can. Look at that picture! Then they talk to me about labels!”

  “Abel with a label,” she said, giggling.

  “Can an oak tree grow in a flower pot?”

  “It’s got to start somewhere, hasn’t it, old feller?”

  “Oh well. Here, you take this five shillings and go and get me a sheet of cartridge paper and an ounce of coarse-cut Cavendish. You can spend the rest on something to eat, anything you like, and we might as well have a jug of beer.”

  She took the ewer from the washstand. “Poor old Abel with his poor old label,” she said, and went out. He pealed the label off the can and, angrily at first, started to rough out the design as Solly Schwartz had suggested it. Working on a few square inches of paper, he felt like a plainsman in a cellar—he was too big for it. He saw a pea vine as something like Jack’s beanstalk. But soon, when the girl came back with the cartridge paper and he had pinned it down and got out his water colours, he became engrossed in the work. He reduced his pea to the size of a pea-and-a-half. He romanticised it, idealised it, shaded and highlighted it until it resembled a sparkling pea-green jewel. He hung up great pods of polished jade tickled to bursting point by pretty curly tendrils. By the time he came to the tomatoes, he was beginning to enjoy himself. He liked tomatoes, too; and the ones he painted from memory were wonderful in their flawless perfection: no one ever saw such tomatoes on a costermonger’s barrow. Jewellers put such tomatoes in velvet-lined cases and sell them for five thousand pounds apiece. As for his chicken soup, it was so rich that it might have been ready to pour into 22-carat ingots. Having gone so far he could not stop. “Perhaps he’ll take one or two more,” he said, and painted two more labels, for a tin of carrots, and a tin of plums.

  “Come on, old Abel with a label,” said the girl, yawning on the divan, “I can’t stay awake much longer.”

  “Don’t bother me now. If you can’t stay awake, go to sleep. I’ve got to finish the lettering.”

  When Solly Schwartz saw his work he struck his iron foot in an ecstasy of admiration until it rang like an alarm bell, crying: “That’s the thing, that’s the very thing! The other two? The carrots, the plums? Certainly! How much was it I said I’d pay you? A pound apiece, was it? Right, here’s five pounds—and here’s a couple of pounds extra for a good job.”

  “I don’t know,” said Abel Abelard pensively fluffing out his beard, “now that I come to look at them in cold daylight, you know, they look … Well, rather too good to be true, I’m afraid.”

  “That’s the whole point, you donkey! That’s the beauty of them, don’t you see? Write me down your name and address on a bit of paper.”

  Five days later, carrying a large, brand-new suitcase and dressed in sober pepper-and-salt, Solly Schwartz caught the 8.15 at Euston, bound for Slupworth in the Midlands, where W. W. Narwall lived.

  CHAPTER XVI

  PEOPLE who were born in Slupworth and cannot afford to go elsewhere are proud of the town which is, they boast, ever so old. Gloomy, dour, sullen farmers working in their fields outside the town have unearthed undeniable evidence of Slupworth’s antiquity. In the Museum—three glass cases in the Free Library—there are flint arrow-heads and axe-heads that date back to the Stone Age. It is indicated that Neolithic nomads, weary of wandering, gazed upon the valley of Slupworth and said, in effect: “Here is the Promised Land.” There are also some Roman remains, dug up by some busybody of a vicar who fancied himself as an archæologist; several broken pots, a broken bronze buckle, a broken spear-head, a broken sword, several handfuls of scrap metal so deeply corroded that not even the British Museum can make head or tail of them, three copper coins utterly defaced, and a bronze knob. Of this knob one expert has said one thing, and another something else. It has a shelf all to itself. Thus it is conveyed that Slupworth was good enough for the Romans, who were masters of the world. They could have wallowed in the fleshpots of Egypt, rolled on silken carpets in Syria, and made merry in ancient Rome—but they came to Slupworth. A mud slinger who said that some centurion on his way to the Wall had probably halted in the valley to get a drink of water and a bite to eat and give his men a chance to tighten their harness, throw their rubbish away, and empty their bowels before hurrying on, became a social outcast in Slupworth.

  Queen Elizabeth stopped there and listened to a quarter of the mayor’s oration before she boxed his ears, called him a tight-mouthed ninny, and went on her way. Cavaliers and Roundheads skirmished in the valley. One of King Charles’ gentlemen, wounded in the thigh, crawled to the door of a certain Mistress Endless and begged for shelter in the name of Christian charity, because Ireton’s men were on his track. She not only took him in; she locked him in, and sent her grandson galloping belly-to-earth on a neighbour’s horse to fetch one of Ireton’s sergeants whose name was Hip-And-Thigh Edge, whom the Royalist fought, hopping on one leg, until he was brought down by a musket ball. His sword and gloves, also, are in the Museum, under a card upon which the librarian has written their history, and the reason why the main road of Slupworth was called Endless Road until the Restoration, when it was renamed Royal Road.

  But Slupworth did not become truly great until 1806, when a man called Horace Hodd, who had managed to secure a contract to provide hides for the government, established a great tannery by the river at the north end of the town. (The central square of Slupworth is still called Hodd Circus.) Drovers whipped in great herds of cattle; for while he was about it Hodd had undertaken to provide the Navy with salt beef—salt being available in abundance from Cheshire, not too far to the north-west. Out of the beeves came tallow, which someone else bought and turned into soap and candles in a manufactory that grew and grew. In 1825 someone discovered a seam of coal less than three miles north of the town, and a local speculator sunk a shaft. He was a lucky speculator. He found iron as well as coal. Since then, no doubt, he has found brimstone. So, up sprang a great foundry, and no one in Slupworth need want for hard work. Men, women and children went crawling down into the pit the coal-and-ironmaster had digged for himself. Hungry men and pregnant women pecked his profit out of the coal face while famished six-year-old children, yelping under the canes of the overseers, pushed the loaded trolleys. Babies were born, and died in the Slupworth pits—and begotten, too, for vile things happened in the dark. But the foundries and tanneries and cand
le factories thundered and rumbled and blazed, and the smoke of their burning went up to heaven … and came down again, rejected by God, to settle in soot upon the town, which grew richer and richer, and dirtier and dirtier. The magnates’ wives—one or two very wealthy men had bought young ladies out of impecunious polite society—began to withdraw, politely, from Slupworth. They didn’t mind its money but they couldn’t stand its breath. Over by Turton, a few miles up the river, where the clay was, a Lancashire man had already established a great brick kiln. Fine red brick houses were put up in walled gardens in a place called Woody Dell, half an hour’s carriage drive from the town. Hodd, the tanner, built something like the Royal Pavilion at Brighton. The soap-and-candle-maker, although he was not so rich as Hodd, called in an architect from London and ordered something in the Italian style, with a moat to surround it. The coal-and-ironmaster, to everyone’s chagrin and astonishment, demonstrated himself as a modest man of simple taste: his house was a scale model of Buckingham Palace, considerably less than half size.

  Slupworth has its show places. Its history is not without dramatic incident. When the invisible King Lud sent out his inaudible word there was the devil to pay in Slupworth, Hell emptied itself. The pits spewed up a legion of gaunt men, women and children, black as devils, armed with pick-axes, shovels and lighted torches. Out of the foundries came a fiendish mob of half-naked, copper-coloured, smoke-smudged men with burned hands and faces, brandishing sledge-hammers. From one of the mine shafts there came a heavy explosion, a dull red glow—as chance would have it, at that moment there was an explosion of fire-damp. The rioters marched into the town, but a man whose name is unrecorded ran in ahead of the procession and warned the authorities, saying that his wife was bad with dust in the chest, and he hoped, God forgive him, that the gentlemen would kindly remember him. The Slupworth militia was called out and broke the rioters with one brief volley of ball, killing three and wounding twelve. Then the mob, throwing down picks, hammers, tongs, and torches, ran off into the dark, hotly pursued by the militia, led by Colonel of Militia Horace Hodd on horseback. Nineteen were caught. Sixteen of these, being grown men, were described as “ringleaders”, and hanged at the next assizes. The other three, being ten-year-old boys, were sentenced to transportation for life, and packed off to Australia, where one of them died under the whip, one committed suicide, and one lived to beget children and breed sheep. His great-great-great grandson is not above telling the tale, although he has made a million out of sheep and has a controlling interest in a newspaper. He boasts of his history, talking through clenched teeth, almost without moving his lips, which is the way they speak in Slupworth … not unlike old lags who can carry on intimate conversations ventriloquially under the eye of the jailer. But the Slupworthians say: “Ah, see? That’s a Slupworth lad. That lad ships tons and tons of mutton to England every week—hundreds of tons. You can keep your London. It’s Slupworth as feeds England.”