The Thousand Deaths of Mr Small

by Gerald Kersh

  He would deal with the whole damned lot in one handful. The mob, with its childish cruelty, its womanish tenderness, its easily-squeezed tears, and shillings—the mob was the thing. Who would waste his life handling one fool—a sympathetic fool, at that—when he could sit on his back-side and handle ten million?

  Puppets, puppets!

  *

  Touching the matter of puppets, Charles Small thinks, it was curious that the little girl, Priscilla, should be enthusiastic over the horse and the sword, while he was preoccupied with the little dancing dolls on the toy stage. With the strings on his fingers, he made the dolls gesticulate and dance. At the flick of a finger a painted Parisienne showed black stockings, an area of pink thigh, and frilly lace drawers in the high kick of a Can-can. At the twitch of a thumb Harlequin made a pirouette and fell upon his knees. He had only to beckon, and some ogreish Punchinelio (not unlike Solly Schwartz) lived or died. There was also a fairy, with the wings of a butterfly, helplessly obedient to every movement of the third finger of his left hand; and a comical horse that performed fantastic antics when he tickled a bit of string with his index finger.

  In a way, it was something like being God. After much practice, Charles Small made a display of his puppets for the benefit of his parents and Uncle Nathan and Aunti Lily. I. Small bellowed and bleddied with delight. Mrs. Small was pleased because her sister and brother-in-law were amused. Priscilla was unimpressed. But Nathan, the Photographer, in his slow, considered tones, said: “The boy has a talent for the theatre.”

  At this, Charles Small’s heart bounded into his throat; because although it gave him great pleasure to play with puppets and win applause, he felt that, in point of fact, it was the puppet that caught the eye and got the laughter and jerked the tears. He wanted to be a puppet—an actor.

  When his little show was over, his mother said: “Charley, recite for Uncle Nathan—with actions!”

  Charles Small made a corkscrew of his right foot on the floor and another of his left forefinger in one of his nostrils, and blushed burning red from head to foot. The old man whispered—it sounded like an escape of steam from a boiler at bursting point—“Bleddy-well do what you’re told! Honour thy bleddy father and thy bleddy mother! Recite, with bleddy actions, beggar it!”

  So young Charles composed himself, stood in front of the toy theatre by the fallen puppets, struck all kinds of dramatic attitudes, and quoted Macbeth:

  “… 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….”

  —but at this point Millie Small said: “Shush! You mustn’t talk about such things!”

  I. Small, taking his cue, bellowed: “Break his neck! Death, schmeth—where do they pick up such dirty-rotten words, the bleddy hooligans? Education, give them! Apologise, at once, or over goes this bleddy teapot on the wrong side of your head!”

  He brandished the big brown teapot, the contents of which poured through his sleeve into his arm-pit; whereupon he cried out like a hare in the teeth of a greyhound, and danced a wild Lezgouinka, knocking a jar of cherry jam into Nathan’s lap. He, with characteristic coolness, scraped jam off his fly with a knife and—with characteristic presence of mind—smeared it on a slice of bread and butter, cleaning his trousers with a corner of the table-cloth moistened in one of the little puddles of spilled tea, saying meanwhile: “Let the boy go on.”

  Millie Small said to Charles: “Charley—recite; but no death! There’s no such word.”

  With the air of a philologist, a Dr. Johnson, a Roget, a Webster, I. Small growled: “No such bleddy word!”

  Then Charles Small, who really yearned for an audience, began again:

  “… Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;

  I come to bury Cæsar, not to praise him.

  The evil that men do lives after them;

  The good is oft interred with their bones …”

  I. Small shouted: “Here he is again with his bones! What kind of respectable talk is bones? To bed! Bury, schmury—bones, schmones! God forbid! Death, God forbid, is all they can think of! A goy he’s turning out to be! Any more death and I’ll break his bleddy neck!”

  But Nathan, the Photographer, said soothingly: “Quiet, Srul. It’s poetry. Let the boy recite.”

  Although they all hated him, everyone had respect for Nathan. Millie looked at I. Small, who looked back, shrugging his shoulders.

  “Let him recite,” said Nathan. “What’s the matter? It’s Shakespeare.”

  “Oi, Shakespeare,” muttered I. Small.

  So Charles Small began again:

  “… To be, or not to be: that is the question:

  Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

  The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

  Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

  And by opposing end them. To die: to sleep;

  No more; …”

  “Here he is again with his death! To bed! To sleep! No more!” cried I. Small.

  So Charles Small was sent to bed, while Priscilla laughed heartily at the whole affair.

  Twenty minutes later as he lay, strengthening his determination to become an actor, the old man came upstairs with an orange, which he pressed into Charles’s hand while he patted his shoulder and said: “Na! A liddle orange. Eat it … Be a good boy … It serves you right … I don’t want you should use such talk—death! No more!”

  More than an hour later, when the Nathans were gone, I. Small shook Charles out of a deep sleep to offer him a liver-sausage sandwich, a banana, and a piece of stewed mackerel. Charles Small remembers turning away with a grunt. He would have dropped back into oblivion if the old man, tip-toeing downstairs with the tray, had not tripped over a loose stair-rod and tumbled headlong with a noise that aroused not only his son, but half the dogs in the neighbourhood, so that the night became hideous.

  Charles Small got out of bed and went downstairs, followed by Priscilla, who, seeing her father with mackerel in his moustache and liver sausage all over his chin, clambered over him, shrieking with glee, to lick it off, especially the liver sausage—at which the old man muttered “Bleddy murderer,” or something of the sort, but submitted. The sensation, in fact, was not unpleasant. Then there was a roaring of water and the slam of a door, and Mrs. Small ran screaming out of the lavatory with a newspaper folded back at the account of an exceptionally atrocious mass murder with which she had hoped to curl up. Soon, the children were slapped, I. Small was told off, Mrs. Small, indignant at the thought of death, went back to her mass murder, and Charles went back to sleep and dreamed that he was an actor.

  As for Priscilla, she never dreamed, except when she was conscious—and only then with calculation.

  *

  … Oh, dear Lord God! Charles Small moans to himself, helplessly snatching at the ping-pong ball of his memory, which will not go where he wants it to go, but bounces inevitably to the place where the Showman has arranged for it—the black hole in the centre of things, the dark deep, the nothingness.

  Can Charles Small ever forget his awful grief when they would not let him go on the stage and be a great actor?

  By some incredible fluke he won a County Scholarship, which entitled him to free entrance to a Secondary School, and a few pounds a year for books, etc…. Oh, woe is Charles Small when he goes over in his mind the last dreadful days of that examination! He had succeeded in all the written tests; but there was a last, terrible one to pass—the Oral Examination.

  The boy was almost out of his mind with anxiety. The day before he had to face the black-gowned examiners at the Middlesex Grammar School, he developed a sore throat. His uvula suddenly made its existence felt—it waggled like the pendulum of a clock out of order; heavy, erratic, but burning hot, while his head seemed to glow like a gas-fire, stifling his nostrils with
its mephitic fumes. Charles Small knew that if he said one word the old man would pirouette like Nijinsky, bleddying and beggaring until the pigeons on the roof flew away in fright, while his mother had convulsions and nervous diarrhœa. Then there would be called in the swag-bellied Dr. Fleming, who would poke a spatula into his palate and tell him to say Arh-h-h and give him a frightful gargle compounded of alum and vinegar. After that, by main force, they would keep him in bed if they had to trice him up or hobble him like a horse, and there he’d lie, while the old man, hands clasped under coat-tails, rushed up and down doing nothing but bleddying, and Mrs. Small administered her specific. This was an indescribably vile mixture of Ipecacuhana, Squills, and Tolu. It made one vomit. It was worse than an ulcerated throat. His mother was a wonderful one for homely remedies. She was especially good at purgatives. Even on the palmiest days she dosed him with California Syrup of Figs—until Nathan, the Photographer, told her that this stuff was nothing but figs boiled with senna pods—whereupon she bought a lot of dried figs and senna pods, and boiled them with sugar in a saucepan until all the goodness was out of them, and forced this explosive mixture down his throat. Priscilla, naturally, simply spat it out; but Charles Small—despicable creature—gulped it down just to keep the peace. Priscilla said that she didn’t want it, she didn’t need it, it made her make unnecessary Noises, and they could kill her if they liked but she just wasn’t going to have it. He took it, and—Wow!—what Noises he made!

  On the whole, it was better to be quietly sick than painfully and noisily cured. Millie Small had a great predilection for excrement. Like an American, she regarded the egestion of a great heap of dung as a sign of health and vitality. To her, an apple was not something to eat and enjoy: it was a means to an end, a lower end—it kept the bowels open. In any case, the family was on tip-toe. The old man was bleddying and beggaring up and down the neighbourhood, bragging about Charles Small’s “Ural Examinations”, while Millie Small, hopping like a sparrow from sister to sister, was boasting about little Charley’s Scholarship.

  If he flopped now, no one would ever hear the end of it. So he covered up. At breakfast he said nothing, because he was quite dumb. He did not eat, because it was impossible for him to eat. It was assumed that he was too preoccupied with scholastic affairs. I. Small, with egg on his moustache, looked grave, and wagged an admonitory finger. Mrs. Small said: “I’ll make you a chicken for when you come back.” Charles did not reply because, quite simply, he could not. He took the tram to the grammar school, and was confronted by someone like Boris Karloff in a black cotton gown, who demanded of him where Havelock fought, and in what war.

  Charles Small had some idea that Havelock had fought in the Indian Mutiny, but all he could say was: “Ook.” Then the examiner asked him to recite the names of the British kings from Henry II to Elizabeth. Charles Small said: “Oo-ook … Eek … Gook … Heek …”—until the Oral Examiner took him on in Mental Arithmetic.

  “Twice two?”

  “Ooo!”

  “Divide five-hundred-and-thirty-six by two.”

  “Boop!”

  Now the examiner, who might have been designed by Charles Addams, was a good fellow. He saw the feverish, incoherent little boy, and was sorry for him. Still, he had to finish the examination with the Geography Test. He made it easy. “What is the capital of France?” he asked.

  “Moop,” said Charles Small.

  “Correct,” said the examiner, patting Charles Small on the cheek—and then, having passed him, took him in his arms and carried him out, and put him in a taxi, and gave the driver half a crown, saying: “Take this young fellow to wherever he lives … Where do you live, m’boy?”

  “Bloop!”

  “Wait a minute.” The examiner, fluttering in his black gown like a vampire bat, ran back into the building, and came back with a piece of paper, which he handed to the taxi-driver, saying: “Take him there. Take him away. Please go away.”

  So, Charles Small was dragged, unconscious, out of a taxi, while Millie Small knocked over a pot of coffee, which (of course) poured over I. Small’s ankles, and some visiting sister nodded wisely and said: “I knew it all along. Education. That’s how they kill themselves.”

  I. Small, furious, cried: “Education—schmeducation! Before I let the bleddy beggar kill himself, I’ll break his bleddy neck!”

  Charles Small passed out, but he had won the Junior County Scholarship—and so, in due course, became an important man in the Dramatic Society.

  *

  It was said, later on, that the Higher Education had been the ruin of the boy. He won the Reading Prize, uproariously repeating Pitt’s speech concerning the employment of German mercenary troops by George III in the War of Independence—with actions. When he got to the peroration: “… If I were an American as I am an Englishman … I nevah would lay down my arms, nevah, nevah, NEV AH!” his vehemence was such that, at the last word, his nose began to bleed. It was impossible, in these circumstances, not to award the boy the Reading Prize—a somewhat shoddy-looking copy of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, printed microscopically in a type called Pearl, so that it was illegible, and bound in some frightful imitation leather called Rexine. Never will Charles Small forget the last NEV AH!—he bled for hours afterwards. His mother, weeping with delight, and his father, growling so terribly that the crowd made a passage for him, dragged Charles Small—who was dripping blood from his nose all over Boswell’s Life of Johnson—into a taxi, where he bled all over the old man’s trousers. “Bleddy education!” shouted I. Small.

  Then Charles Small was put to bed. The old man came back with a pound of rump steak, bellowing: “Quick, Millie! Underdo it for the little beggar, the butcher told me—it makes up for the loss from bloody bled—bleddy blood—blood, schmud, mud!—Underdo it, don’t overdo it!”

  While the pots and pans were clattering in the kitchen downstairs, the old man sat on the edge of his son’s bed, and, being proud of the boy, gave him a dusty peppermint tablet out of his waistcoat pocket. Charles Small remembers that, on the whole, he enjoyed this affair. The old man gingerly picked up the Boswell, opened it at random, and read a few words. He grumbled a little under his breath, and muttered: “‘Yes sir’ … ‘no sir’ … sir, schmir! That’s what they teach them already! Take a lesson. Sis the bourgeoisie. No sirs, schmirs! If I was an American as I am a bleddy Englishman … goodness knows what!” Stroking his sleeves contemplatively, he concluded: “Boychik, take it from me: never will I lay down these arms—to the bones I’d work them for you!”

  Then Millie Small came up with a pound of fried steak on a platter, which the boy Charles attacked with something like ecstasy, while the old man, nodding and smiling, brushing up his moustache, his eyes moist with pride, stammered: “Eat it all up! … It, it, it makes blood … I mean bled … I mean …” Confused, he shouted: “I haven’t had your bleddy education.”

  Millie took Boswell’s Life of Johnson downstairs, and, dressing herself in her best, rushed out to show it to Lily, the wife of Nathan, the Photographer.

  Thus, Charles Small became acquainted with the Drama.

  *

  After this there was no stopping him. The old man nearly jumped out of his skin one afternoon when he came into the sitting-room and found Charles Small horribly hunch-backed, with a cushion stuffed under his jacket, his face distorted, clawing at his reflection in a mirror, and declaiming lines by Shakespeare out of the mouth of Richard Crookback. I. Small was frightened. It seemed to him that the boy had gone mad.

  “… I am determined to prove a villain,

  And hate the idle pleasures of these days.

  Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,

  By drunken prophecies, libels and dreams …”

  He groped for something heavy, because it seemed to him that the child might bite him. But when Charles turned and confronted him, still scratching the air with curved fingers and leering disgustingly—carried away by his rôle—all the old man could say was: “Sh
hh!”

  “Shakespeare!” cried Charles Small. “King Richard!”

  Charles dragged the cushion from under his jacket and resumed his natural form, while his features composed themselves.

  Poking at the cushion with his left hand, while, feeling his son’s spine with his right, I. Small sighed and said: “Ah, ah, Shakespeare. Sis different.” Then, stroking the boy’s shoulder, he said: “Khatzkele, I want you should always make with Shakespeare, do you hear? A Yiddisher boy should stick miv his own people—no bourgeois! … Na!—take already the cushion. Sis Shakespeare. But put it back. And don’t twist your face like that—liddle boys what twist up their faces, they stay like that.”

  Charles Small stuffed the cushion back under his coat and made such faces at himself that he could not sleep for several nights for dreaming of himself; while the old man went downstairs to the kitchen and said to Mrs. Small: “He’ll turn out to be an actor, yet!”—grinning like an imbecile

  Millie Small (trust her to spoil everything) said: “An actor. That’s all we are short of, an actor!”

  *

  Yet Charles Small really did turn out to be an actor manqué. He knows that he still is a player who has missed the bus as he lies there putting on the devil of an act with his belly-ache, which is not acute, and his nerves, which are no more snarled and tangled than the line on a fisherman’s carelessly-cast reel that an hour of patient concentration will disentangle and make slick and smooth again. Actor manqué—actor râté! Monkey, rat!

  A year after he won the Reading Prize with bis “nevah, nevah, NEVAH” (The old man, loaded with bloody towels, his moustache anti-clockwise, warned him at the top of his voice never to shout again, brandishing a chamber-pot: “—or over goes this bleddy chamber on the wrong side of your head.” Of course, the contents of the china vessel into which Charles Small had bled from the nose, and micturated, poured over I. Small’s head and also up his sleeve, so that there were ructions in the house. Flapping about with his sodden collar and trying to wring out his soaking sleeve at the same time, the old man howled: “No more never! There’s no such bleddy word! Never no more never! If I were a bleddy American as I am a bleddy Englishman, over would go this pot on the wrong side of your head! I never would lay down my bleddy arms! … No more never, or you’ll get something, bleddy little beggar!”)—a year later, there was a Speech Day and School Concert. Suddenly, prematurely, Charles Small’s voice broke, so that he spoke with grotesque intonations. He sounded like a fantasia for the wood-winds and strings: now, he was a bassoon; half a second later, he was a flute; and then, blushing like a letter-box, took over the oboe and got in a few pure notes before something went pizzicato in his larynx and precipitated him into the tuneless depths of the double-bass … out of which he struggled, making a noise like a tin whistle. This was very embarrassing to Charles Small. To make matters worse, hair began to grow on his legs, so that, since he wore short knickers, he was ashamed. He begged abjectly for trousers—at which Millie Small was so overcome that she got to the lavatory in what might be described as a photo-finish and the old man struck him on the wrist with a buttered muffin, and punished him by taking away his silver watch and chain, saying: “You have nothing but your chains to bleddy-well lose! No trousers, schnip!” (He returned the watch and chain three minutes later, thunderously scowling and growling: “Let it be a lesson! Trousers, schmousers!”)