The Thousand Deaths of Mr Small

by Gerald Kersh

  I see no reason

  Why powder and treason

  Should ever be forgot.

  —it was History; and what was more, in the ashes of the bonfire the boys baked potatoes.

  This, he now realises, was about the most injudicious thing he could possibly have said to Millie Small. What? Potatoes? He didn’t have enough potatoes at home? He had to go out with little ruffians and cook potatoes like a tramp in the ashes and the dirt and come home with goodness knows what diseases? He could have baked potatoes to-morrow. No bonfires. No baked potatoes. No sixpence. No fireworks. They were dangerous.

  It was useless to argue. Charles sulked in the shadows of the shop. Then in came the big coster with his musty little pot of dying chrysanthemums, and his beery breath, glaring at her with his great grey bloodshot eyes that looked like oysters caught in little nets of red thread.

  “Lovely pot of ’zanths, lady—come on, lovely pot of ’zanths. Eighteenpence or an old coat. Come on!”

  She screamed: “Srul!”

  The old man came up, mumbling, his mouth full of nails, hammer in hand. He was in his shirt-sleeves, and his cuffs were turned back almost to the armpits. As he stood there, armed with a hammer, scowling over his military moustache, while his mouth bristled with bright iron brads, he might have passed as a terrifying figure. “What the bleddy——” he began.

  “Lovely ’zanth. Eighteenpence or an old coat,” said the coster.

  Then Charles Small saw that his parents were afraid. The coster had an air of menace. I. Small, that shrewd man of affairs, said, “A couple of flowers in the house, eh, Millie…. I’ll give you a shilling.”

  “Done for a bob!” said the coster, handing over the flowerpot and pocketing the shilling.

  As soon as he was gone I. Small and his wife turned on each other, suddenly courageous.

  “The rates to pay, and so flowers she wants!”

  “He calls himself a man! Why didn’t you throw the hooligan out?”

  “By her, throwing out holligans is by me a full-time job.”

  “You should call a pleeceman.”

  “Pleeceman, schmeeseman! Flowers she wants! That’s all she’s short of.”

  I. Small went down noisily to his workshop. Soon they heard the noise of his hammer again. “A few flowers for the house,” said Mrs. Small, wrapping the flower pot in red crêpe paper. But the chrysanthemums died that night. There was a terrible scene. Now she is dead, and serve her right. No one was really sorry; no one except I. Small, and he was heartbroken. Why? He never knew an unbroken hour of happiness with that woman. She crossed him at every path, she bedevilled and bewildered him. She humiliated him. She ruined him. Oh, if only Charles Small’s father had hit Charles Small’s mother a good swinging punch on the jaw! But he could only shout and flap about with a torn newspaper; a crushed man.

  And so, perhaps, when she died, his heart was broken and his world had come to an end because there was no one at whom he could safely shout and flap; because, remembering all of him that was so ridiculous, everyone was sorry for him. Suddenly, they all became polite to I. Small, and went out of their way to be kind to him. So, by imperceptible degrees, the old man’s world changed, and he was lost. Therefore he clung desperately to what he thought he knew: that is to say, he threw his hooks into his son, Charles Small.

  *

  To pity and to hate in retrospect: that way madness lies. But Charles Small’s brain is spinning and whining and teetering like a humming-top … like the clockwork humming-top his mother bought him that grey day when she went to visit the Nameless Woman of Chelsea.

  She, he had gathered, having long ears, this Nameless Woman, was an abomination of desolations. No decent woman would touch her with a broomstick, for fear of contracting an unmentionable disease that caused one to rot away, to fall into paralysis, and to go raving mad. Mrs. Small and her sisters talked of her only in whispers, I. Small, of course, did not whisper. He would break into the psst-psst-psst of the women with the buzz-saw cry of a hunting leopard—which was as close as he could get to a sotto-voce—saying: “Not in front of the children! That’s what they are! All they can talk about is obstitutes. Not another word! In my house never should nobody mention that woman!”

  To this, Lily, the wife of Nathan, the Photographer, said: “You mean prostitute, Srul.”

  “Mnyeh!” said I. Small, stamping out of the room, and dragging Charles after him. Charles, of course, was devoured by curiosity. “What’s an obstitute?” he asked, when they were alone, for I. Small’s male rage had gone in smoke, with a harmless pop like a Chinese cracker.

  The old man said: “Don’t use such language. It’s … a Bad Woman.”

  “Daddy, what does she do?”

  I. Small was embarrassed. He said: “Better you shouldn’t know. But touch a Bad Woman, and your head falls off. Enough! Go; be a good boy.”

  For some time after that Charles Small wondered about Bad Women. In what way, exactly, was a woman Bad? He had, for example, been called a Bad Boy for playing with matches, for throwing stones, for getting his feet wet, and for losing a pocket handkerchief. Yet his mother and his father did all these things, and more. I. Small could not hang a picture without doing incalculable damage, or strike a match without setting light to the wrong thing. He could not boil a kettle of water without making an explosion, followed by an uproar. Mrs. Small never had a handkerchief—she was always losing them—and she always had a cold because her feet were always wet. They were Good. Then what was Bad? The boy pondered, and remembered one breakfast-time when he cracked an egg and an appalling stench came out. His mother snatched it away, pronouncing it Bad. He arrived at the conclusion that a Bad Woman was in some way comparable to a bad egg, and thereafter he went about sniffing at women. None of them smelled very good to him—only one, and she was the Bad Woman, the Nameless Woman.

  She was a harmless young woman, he recollects, who had been a close friend of the Moss girls, and a frequent visitor at the Moss house, especially on Sundays. Then she fell in love with an Italian, a prosperous dried-fruit merchant, who could not marry her because his wife, a good Catholic, could not divorce him. So they went and lived in sin, in an elegant maisonette in Kensington, where he kept her in style. But thereafter the Moss girls shuddered, almost spat, when her name, or rather her namelessness, was mentioned in public. Secretly (trust them!) they went out of their way to meet her, the double-faced bitches, and, green with envy at her furs and her jewels, sighed over her fall; and went back to their husbands, full of embittered virtue and vague discontent, thanking God that they were not as she was; wishing to God that they were. Charles Small remembers …

  Early one afternoon his mother took him to a shop in Oxford Street to buy him a hat. He wanted a virile tweed cap with a stiff peak. She would not hear of that—rough boys wore caps—and clapped on his head and paid for a hat which, even to this day, when he thinks of it, causes him to dig his nails into his palms, and knot his legs, and groan curses at the ceiling, the whey-coloured ceiling. It was a hat such as could never have been seen before or since—a furry pudding-basin with ear-flaps. On the crown, looking as if it might fall off at any moment, hung a fuzzy knob. Crowning humiliation! Charles Small was hauled out of the shop, crying at the top of his voice … and a pretty spectacle that must have been, with most of his teeth missing! Millie was embarrassed. She threatened him with grievous bodily harm, and in the same breath promised him rich rewards if only he would stop crying. He already knew the value of her threats and her promises, and cried on. Then, in the street, they almost collided with a most beautiful and elegant lady who exclaimed: “Why, Millie!” in an upper-class accent. Then Charles Small’s mother and the lady kissed each other and conversed in undertones, while Charles, informed by some intuition that this was the Bad Woman, licked away some tears from his lip and cautiously sniffed. If this is a Bad Woman, he thought, what does a Good Woman smell like? Recollecting, he guesses that she must have used Opponax, that supp
osedly aphrodisiac perfume which was so popular in those days … those dead days unburied that walk, and walk, crying for a good deep grave. The Bad Woman, the Nameless One, took them to a quiet, elegant shop where they had tea and the most exquisite pastries, full of fresh cream and fruit. Charles Small regrets that he was too preoccupied with the confectionery to pay attention to the conversation. But at last, stuffed to the back teeth, he had a very urgent whisper of his own, tugging at his mother’s skirt, so that Millie had to take him away for a minute or two. By the time they had returned the Nameless Woman had paid the bill and was ready to go. She and his mother embraced discreetly. The Nameless Woman (he has not forgotten the pressure of her hands, which were so slender and plump, and yet so strong) snatched him up and kissed him. He can still feel the pleasant roughness of some frill of lace at her bosom … and above all the good, the excellent, the inescapable smell of her….

  And now his mother looked left and right. She looked down at little Charles, and said: “You mustn’t say anything,” and led him to a toy shop where she bought him a mechanical spinning top made of painted tin. He forgets what it cost. It had a red, loose-looking wooden knob on top—not unlike the knob on the crown of the ridiculous hat—and when you twisted this knob you wound a spring, so that the top, placed on the floor, spun, while air rushed in through a little aperture and out of the overblown empty darkness of this cheap toy monotonously whirling and whirling, inevitably staggering and falling and rolling away—out of this came what might have been a song. But it was only a whine, a windy whine. So spins and whines his unsteady ill-balanced head … his deceptively large head which encloses nothing but a little bit of imported clockwork and a ball of shadow. No, it did not fall off. Here it is, creaking and turning, turning and turning; and out of the hole in it, his mouth, comes nothing but a mean little noise of which he is ashamed.

  *

  Liars! Cheats! Charles Small asks himself once again what right they had to eat up his life and (even more bitterly) what right he had had to let them do it. Why, even as a child he recognised them as cowards and fools, liars and weaklings, cheats, creatures of the penumbra. Yes indeed, they lived in the half-shadow, and in that half-shadow they died and, presumably, were damned for their deceit, their wanton self-deceit. He pull his hair until it stands upright and, staring incredulously at the ceiling, laughs a little. It is fantastic. As a little child he knew. As a grown man he knew them to the very soul. The more he knew them, the more he despised them. Here, indeed, familiarity bred contempt—the deeper the familiarity the deeper the contempt. Yet—Charles Small cannot reconcile actuality with common sense—the more he despised them the more he pitied them, and the more he pitied them the more he despised himself. So that when they were at their weakest and most abject and he should have been at his strongest they had him in a deathlock. Oh Lord, the misery of it, when Fear gives place to Compassion! And the double pity of it, when Pity muffles Loathing!

  After his wife died I. Small was inconsolable, good for nothing. Not that he had ever been good for anything much. Now he could not eat, he could not sleep; when he stood up he wished that he was sitting down, and having sat down it was necessary for him to stand up. Standing up, he had to walk; walking, he became weary and stood still. Standing still, he fidgeted. If he saw a flight of stairs he felt compelled to walk up them, and, having reached the top, walk down again to pick at something—the flowers, his nails, anything. He opened drawers and shut them. He fussed with tablecloths. It was as if the Great Curse in the Book of Deuteronomy was upon him—at dawn he wished it were even, and at even he wished that it were dawn. The old man was shattered, like a pot. Charles Small, secretly wishing that the old fool would drop dead, found himself worrying about him. Forgetting vast tyrannies he remembered little secret tendernesses—despising those tendernesses for the secretiveness of them, while sighing sentimentally over them—and he decided what the old man needed was something to do.

  “I’m a burden. It would be better I should die.”

  Charles heartily agreed with him, but said: “Don’t talk like that, Father!” in a shocked voice.

  “I don’t like you should call me Father. When your poor mother, God rest her soul, was alive, you used to call me Daddy. So now it’s Father. This is what we come to. I’m a burden, a burden.”

  He had probably picked up that word burden out of the News of the World, to which he had always subscribed because, as he shrewdly observed, it had less advertisements. The paper was always full of gruesome cases of old gentlemen who had swallowed carbolic acid, cut their throats with bread-knives, thrown themselves under trains, hanged themselves with their braces, broken their ankles jumping out of first-storey windows, and put their heads in gas ovens, because they “felt they were a burden”. The old man had been reading too many newspapers.

  Charles Small went into conference with his wife, saying: “I mean, after all, he is my father.”

  She agreed. She always agreed, the insipid, unastonishable cow.

  “We must give him something to do,” said Charles Small. So they made conspiracies. They invented urgencies. They gave him nails to hammer into walls; they made pretexts for the whitewashing of ceilings (I. Small invariably upset a bucket); they exhausted themselves in their efforts to prove to this silly old burden that he was not a burden. Once they gave him a gross of pencils to sharpen very carefully at both ends. Still I. Small, disconsolate, said: “I’m a burden. A burden should go away.” Nerves were on edge. The children kept asking: “What’s a Burden? Grampa says he’s a Burden. I thought he was Jewish.” He took to hanging about in the kitchen, trying to help. At meal-times they had to coax him to eat. Lustfully eyeing the chicken he would say: “Give it, better, to the children. What for waste chicken on a Burden?” Then, having taken away everyone’s appetite, he would eat, saying between mouthfuls: “It chokes me.” Charles Small knew where he had got that one. He remembered his mother, and the deceit of the fried fish, and pushed away his plate, nauseated—observing which, I. Small went on burdening and burdening and burdening.

  At last, when they were all at their wits’ end, some salesman of job lots waylaid Charles Small in his office and offered to sell him, dirt cheap, a million paper-clips of various shapes and sizes. So he bought them, the whole million of them; had them shaken up, mixed, in bags, and brought them to the old man, saying: “Father, this is important. We want your help. These are vitally important paper-clips and fasteners. They’ve all got mixed up. They have all got to be sorted out and arranged according to size and quality. I need your help. Urgently! I want you to drop everything and sort out these fasteners. Look: see? The little brass ones, the little wire ones … the medium-sized, and the big ones … See? All in order. It’s vitally important there should be no mistake. Is that clear?”

  The old man was delighted. Now he had something to occupy his woolly old mind. It seemed, for a couple of days, that there might be peace in the house. But I. Small, becoming important again, again became even more intolerable. A case in point: one evening when Charles Small, after a hard day, put a Chopin Nocturne on the gramophone and sat down smoking a cigarette to listen quietly in the twilight, trying to soothe himself, I. Small came down raging in his shirt-sleeves, brandishing a paper-clip, roaring in something like his old voice: “Gramophones they want! No bleddy noise! How should a man concentrate in this bleddy house?”

  Charles Small remembers that instead of telling the fool to go to the devil he said: “All right, Father” … and stopping the Nocturne, sat back disconsolately, thinking. His father was working like a demon on the paper-clips. Soon, they had all been arranged in order. Then what? He brooded. At last he remembered an engineer named Watt whom he had watched in an idle moment. Watt was swabbing some part of a machine with a wad of cotton-waste—an almost inextricable tangle of threads of different colours. When the old man was done with his paper-clips it would be a good idea to buy two, three hundred pounds of the cotton-waste, and say that he urgently
needed the threads unravelled and grouped in their proper colours: that ought to keep him busy for a year at least.

  So it did. But much good it did them all! I. Small became irritable, arrogant, unapproachable. He started work at dawn and continued until dusk, and then he wanted to rest; and then if you wanted to play a little Mozart he would come down like a thunderstorm. He worked his fingers to the bleddy bone, and all they knew was bleddy gramophones …

  … Slice him which way you like, the old son of a bitch was a burden.

  Now, thinks Charles Small, everything is a burden. Life is a burden. My wife is a burden. My children are a burden. And who is to blame? Mother? Agreed. Father? Agreed. Above all, who is to blame? I am to blame. But for myself I might have been happy.

  Dead loss … dead loss …

  CHAPTER XVIII

  BUT between the Noblett Street fiasco and the death of Mrs. Small, many strange and terrible things had happened. Little men had grown great, great men had become small, lives had been spoiled and hearts broken.

  Incredible things had come to pass.

  The iron-footed hunchback Solly Schwartz, hopping and hobbling from strength to strength, had kicked down the mighty from their seats and exalted the humble.

  When he left Slupworth, sales manager, advertising manager, and partner to Mr. Narwall—all signed and sealed—he sat in his first-class compartment, dreaming thunderous dreams of tremendous power, restlessly turning one of his cans in his sinewy right hand.

  This was it! Use it and throw it away, and buy another; and so on and on eternally. Impermanent things—they were the only things that lasted—breakable things, things made to be broken or lost. He lit a cigarette and, looking at the smoke, thought, Here again, another good thing—a smoker—what does he do? He burns money; he blows it away—pouf!—like that, the bloody fool…. Then he thought of old Anselmi and his copper pots that lasted fifty years, and laughed a little. Who got rich on customers that came back once every fifty years? Smoke, ashes, tins for the midden—these were the things to sell—in general, waste-matter. Thinking deeply, he arrived at the conclusion that all the commodities worth selling were those that went down the drain or into the dust-bin. Consider coal: you burn it, and you’re cold again, and must buy more. Would the mine-owner get rich on a shovelful of coal that burned for five years? It occurred to him that, tin cans aside, food itself was waste material. You went to work to dig a hole to buy the bread to get the strength to go to work and dig a hole…. Imagine a loaf of bread or a sausage that would keep you going for twelve months—or a potato that would stay your appetite for half a year! Everything would go to the dogs.