The Thousand Deaths of Mr Small

by Gerald Kersh

  So the boy became shyly silent. At one gathering of the family he was coaxed into a recitation. “No bleddy death!” I. Small warned him, letting off steam in a terrible blast through the safety valve under his moustache, so that drops of tea flew all over the place. “No death, or I’ll kill you!”

  Now the last poem Charles Small had been compelled to learn in school was Grey’s Elegy in a Country Churchyard. He recited it with actions again, in a voice something like that of Feodor Chaliapin, but raucous. It set everyone’s nerves on edge—it vibrated in the ears. He thought that he was going pretty well, until he came to the verse:

  “Can storied urn or animated bust

  Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?

  Can honour’s voice invoke the silent dust,

  Or flattery soothe the dull cold ear of death? …”

  Then one of the sisters, who was pregnant, folded her arms over bloated mammary glands, and said: “Bust! Bust! That’s the language they pick up in school!”

  I. Small, purple with humiliation, threatened him with a thin slice of bread and butter, snorting like a grampus: “He’s here again, with his bleddy death, the hooligan!” Charles Small was not put out by this: bat one thing seriously perturbed him—he had begun beautifully in a fine bass-baritone, slipped by easy stages up and down the range of a cello, and ended on the shrill note of a fife.

  He had disgraced himself again. After that he became sardonic, taciturn—he was afraid to open his mouth. But—here was one of the cock-eyed idiosyncracies of his larynx—when it came to singing he could keep his voice stable. When he sang it sounded like some fantastic cross between a kettle-drum and a horn. Consequently he was chosen for a leading part in an act out of The Pirates of Penzance in the Prize Day Concert. He led the policemen, singing:

  “When the enterprising burglar’s not a-burgling,

  When the cut-throat isn’t occupied in crime

  He loves to hear the little brook a-gurgling,

  And listen to the merry village chime.

  When the coster’s finished jumping on his mother,

  He loves to lie a-basking in the sun;

  Ah—take one consideration with another,

  A policeman’s life is not a happy one….”

  The applause was deafening. I. Small bounced on his seat, pounding the floor with his stick, his face wet with joy and pride. Millie, who was as happy as he, looked sour—she would never give him the satisfaction of sharing his delights—and said, ominously: “Hm! So that’s what they are. Jumping on his mother, eh? As long as we know!”

  “So what you want I should bleddy do?” asked I. Small in his piercing whisper. “Split his bleddy head open? Sis Shakespeare! Listen to the bleddy clapping.”

  Indeed, Charles Small took a curtain call, and a visiting Lord, who had been prevailed upon to preside over the prize-giving, shook him warmly by the hand. He also shook the hands of Mr. and Mrs. Small and told them that they had “a promising young fellow.” Mrs. Small got to the lavatory one jump ahead of another proud mother—her son had been Chief of the Pirates—who could not contain her urine.

  Millie Small scuttled back just in time to see the Lord and his Lady pausing by Charles Small and the old man. Millie could have sunk into the ground with embarrassment; for her husband, bent on doing the right thing, dragged out of his breast pocket a silver cigar-case not much smaller than a two-pound biscuit tin and said: “A cigar, Your Majesty?” This immense case contained one twopenny cigar, somewhat frayed. The Lord took it with a gracious expression of gratitude, and said to his Lady: “Give the child a sweet, my dear.”

  The Lady rummaged in her silver-mesh bag and found a black-currant throat pastille, brushed some loose rice powder from the surface of it, and popped it into Charles’s mouth. He was so overwhelmed, and the pastille so nauseating, that he swallowed it whole. Then the Lord and the Lady passed on. I. Small had some crack-brained idea of rushing after them and inviting them to Appenrodt’s, but his wife stopped him by pinching him in the arm so savagely that he squeaked, and started to say: “Bled——”. But then he remembered where he was, and whispered: “—dy beggary!” Charles Small stood, still dressed like a policeman, gulping and gulping back what threatened to be a regurgitation of expensive perfume. He looked to the left and to the right: he was hemmed in. He feared that he might not be able to make the dash for the place in time, and started to edge his way into the crowded aisle, but the old man, wet-eyed, grabbed him by the collar, saying, almost insanely incoherent: “Khatzkele! Boychik! … You see what is! Is Shakespeare! … Honour thy bleddy mother! … Shakespeare! … His proper name was Shocket. I was told! Stand by your own people, boychik, and you get education under the English flag!”

  Charles Small’s collar was an Eton collar, and the old man’s affectionate grip and emphatic jolting constricted the boy’s throat. He managed to say: “His name wasn’t Shocket—it was Bacon.”

  He heard his mother say, vigorously nodding: “Hm! So that’s what he is. Bacon. Nice language for a Jewish person!”

  Then, overcome by emotion and poisoned by the pastille—Erhook!—Bouah!—Charles Small threw up a little glutinous lump of medicated confectionery, which bounced off the Headmaster’s waistcoat. He had nothing more inside him to regurgitate, having been too preoccupied with his art to eat since supper-time the night before. Surreptitiously, Millie Small picked up the pastille and wrapped it in a handkerchief, to show her sisters that her son was by way of becoming a pet of the Nobility and Gentry. The Headmaster shook I. Small warmly by the hand, saying: “The Theatre is your son’s bench.”

  The old man, for this occasion, had gone to a barber and had his moustache drastically trimmed and fixed in the Guardee style—rolled upwards with fine curling-tongs into two neat cylinders. His emotion, now, was such that the cylinders of hair uncurled and, moistened with perspiration, hung down so that he looked like an excitable baby walrus. But he did not care. The Smalls were the last out of the hall. In the vestibule the old man stopped, frozen in his tracks, staring at something on the floor. It was the cigar he had given to the Lord. Now this hurt his feelings and tied his tongue so that he said: “Begging bleddary! Chains I should have to lose!” But at that moment a crowd of boys made a circle around Charles Small, singing “For he’s a jolly good fellow! …”—and everybody was happy.

  This, as they said later, was the “ruination” of Charles Small.

  CHAPTER XXIV

  YES, after this, Charles Small remembers his lust for self-exhibition became unbridled. Wherever there was a mirror, there was Charles Small, mowing and gibbering at himself, almost biting himself. Once, playing Hotspur, and shouting:

  “… This is no time

  To play with mammets or to tilt with lips:

  We must have bloody noses and cracked crowns,

  And pass them current too …”

  —he knocked over a vase and cracked the overmantel mirror, incurring the wrath of I. Small, who had been spellbound up to that point. The old man didn’t mind the loss of the vase—it was a present from Lily, the wife of Nathan, the Photographer, inscribed A Present from Margate—but he took exception to “bloody noses”.

  He shouted: “What kind of bleddy talk is this, ‘bloody noses’? Already he’s starting to bleddy-well bloody, the hooligan!”

  “But it’s in the book, Dad—look—that’s the way Shakespeare wrote it. See?”

  I. Small scrutinised the passage and, somewhat mollified, said: “Shakespeare, yes. But no bleddy-well bloodying by you. You’re not Shakespeare … and what’s a Mammet?”

  Charles Small had not been informed that mammets were the lactatory appendages vulgarly known as Tits. But the old man, somehow, was intrigued by the word. Possibly it reminded him—that mother-haunted slob—of “mama”. Mammet! The very sound was like a bell. The word worked its way into his system, like Bleddy—he could not get rid of it. It hooked itself to his vocabulary like a burr when, after a quarrel with the milkman
, he called the man a bleddy mammet—when he was out of ear-shot. After that it was Mammet this, and Mammet that…. “What do they take me for, what? A bleddy mammet?” … “Don’t worry me, Charley—go play with mammets” … and so forth.

  Meanwhile Mr. and Mrs. Small encouraged their boy to recite in public. On one occasion, when the family gathered to shed crocodile tears over the corpse of a cousin three times removed—a poor relation; he could not be removed too many times or too far—Charles was called upon to recite a piece of solemn poetry. He did so with gusto. A relation, even more distant (she wore a wig; they wished her beyond the horizon; she was not elegant enough for them) came and kissed him and said, with tears in her eyes: “Bless him! All my life I should have such a funeral, God forbid!”

  The boy became stage-struck. He entertained the family in the evenings with masterful Shakespearean characterisations. He stuffed a cushion between his shoulders, playing King Richard; he put on one of Millie’s petticoats, glued to his chin a handful of horsehair torn from the sofa, and played Macbeth. (There was the devil to pay about that—the stuff wouldn’t come off.) He smeared his face with a paste of flour and water, smothered it with cotton wool, shoved a great pillow under his jersey and did a Falstaff which, as Nathan, the Photographer, said was as good as Beerbohm Tree. But in this rôle he offended Millie Small, in the soliloquy on the battlefield, when Falstaff speaks of Honour:

  “Honour pricks me on. Yea, but how if honour prick me off when I do come on? How then? …”

  Mrs. Small blushed. She was not used to such language, and shut him up pretty quick. I. Small, in his hurricane-whisper, said: “Millie, for goodness sake, don’t be a mammet—sis Shakespeare!”

  “I don’t like that kind of talk. You’re not in Cracow now,” said Millie Small.

  So Charles Small blackened himself with soot, wrapped himself in a coconut doormat with Welcome stamped on it and played Caliban:

  “… Be not afeared, the isle is full of noises,

  Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.

  Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

  Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices,

  That, if I then had waked after long sleep,

  Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,

  The clouds methought would open and show riches

  Ready to drop upon me, that, when I waked,

  I cried to dream again …”

  With this, I. Small was content. “Riches to drop upon me,” he said, “but what for the bleddy doormat? What for the dirty face?”

  Charles Small was developing an artistic temperament. He shrugged his way out of the room, replaced the doormat, and went to his bedroom, a misunderstood genius. Then he realised that he was hungry. But his artist’s pride held him in thrall. He consoled himself with the plays of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, rehearsing the rôle of Sir Lucius O’Trigger. Carried away, making war-like gestures, he boomed: “Od’s balls and barrels!”—just as the old man crept into the room with some fish on a plate.

  For once, I. Small did not drop the plate. He stepped backwards in alarm and nearly fell over the banisters; but came back with the fish, saying: “Eat it up, boychik.”

  He left the fish and fried potatoes, and rolls and butter, and a glass of milk, on the chest-of-drawers, with a parting benediction: “Sleep well, boychik; so long you shouldn’t grow up to be a mammet.”

  Charles Small, the histrionic prodigy with soot in his ears, scornfully ate his supper to the last crumb, always misunderstood.

  He knows now that his mother sent up the food; that the old man insisted on carrying it; and—this at the back of his mind—poor I. Small was tremendously moved by the line about “crying to dream again”.

  Charles Small wriggles. The isle is full of noises—it is a pandemonium. He has not the least relish for what the heavens are going to drop upon him. The sounds give no delight, and hurt like the devil. He doesn’t want any more dreams—he will settle for plain black sleep.

  Sleep. He may whistle for it. It won’t come. Memory bounces back like the ping-pong ball. Why, oh why for the love of God won’t it take the last cool dive into the deep dark hole and be over and done?

  *

  Weak as a rat, weak as a rat, weak as a rat! thinks Charles Small, ineffectually snapping his teeth at the empty air in the jaws of the terrier, Time—Time, that is shaking him as a terrier shakes a rat, before throwing his limp corpse over the right shoulder into the dust behind.

  He would die before he admitted the fact to anyone but a sympathetic stranger, but they were right—in the Drama lay his ruin; or at least, the seeds of his ruin.

  Few men had ever been cursed as Charles Small curses himself now, while he rolls and writhes in one of his “Moods”, biting the pillow in self-torment. Trust him! He achieves, in the anguish of his impotence, something which he could never accomplish by considered endeavour—he bites right through the pillow, and, coughing, blows out into the room a quantity of chicken feathers, some of which fly into his nostrils and make him sneeze. Thereupon—I. Small to the life!—he takes it out on the pillow, gives it a thorough beating with a feeble fist—and is suffocated with feathers again. The air is full of the pluckings from the hindquarters of clucking fowl. Charles Small cannot get away from them. The feathers are in his eyes, his ears, his hair, his nostrils. He pokes his head out of the window into the open air, but there he finds no relief. He is being tickled all over; sneezing, hawking, scratching, weeping. Fluff and snot, tears and feathers, self-imposed irritation … c’est la vie, c’est la bleddy vie.

  The front door slams. Hettie has sent the brats (he nearly called them “bleddy beggars”) to see Humphrey-Bleddy-Bogart—he means Humphrey-Bloody-Bogart—and much good it may do them!

  He knows that that sloppy, tear-soaked poultice of a wife is loitering about downstairs, probably preparing a milk-pudding; waiting and hoping. The thought fills him with rage. She is quieter than a mouse, but, on the spur of the moment Charles Small tears open the bedroom door and yells: “Can’t a man rest? Hold that bloody noise, will you?”

  (As God is his judge, he said “bleddy”.)

  Hettie comes running, whimpering: “Charley, what’s the matter? What did I do?”

  “Matter!” (He nearly said Matter, schmatter.) “Why didn’t you go to the pictures with the kids?”

  Hettie says: “But, Charley darling, I can’t leave you like this.”

  Now Charles Small, coughing up feathers, screams: “Go, for God’s sake!”

  “Yes, Charley,” says Hettie, and goes. Then Charles Small’s heart is so full of grief and guilt that unshed tears flush out his acidulous stomach and, for a few minutes, he feels like a human being again.

  He opens the bedroom door, crying: “Hey, Hettie! Wait a minute, we’ll go together!” He would quite like to see Humphrey Bogart; only, somehow, he could not give Hettie the satisfaction. “Oh Hettie!” he calls, shambling in stockinged feet into the dining-room. Only an echo answers. Upon the expensive mahogany dining-room table stands a covered dish of delicious chicken, all ready for him, with trimmings. But no Hettie. He picks the chicken up by one leg and makes as if to dash it into the Tudor fireplace; thinks better of it; puts it back on the dish and re-covers it. (Now why does this strike so strangely familiar a note in his mind?)

  Just out of spite he will not eat a thing, although all of a sudden he is hungry. He will die of starvation before he eats that woman’s chicken—her and her Humphrey Bogart! Well, perhaps one wing … No! His will is iron! He goes to the refrigerator in the kitchen and makes himself an inch-thick sandwich of cold beef (cunningly disguising the cut) and pads back to the bedroom, gulping like a wolf. When Hettie comes home and sees the chicken untouched, she will be worried. “Just give me a glass of water,” he will say in a feeble voice. That will teach her. Let her have her Humphrey Bogart….

  He wants his Ivy.

  *

  Now, Charles Small has such a paro
xysm of rage that he bounces upon the bed until the springs groan and the woodwork makes a noise like the trapped mouse that he knows himself to be. Gulping back a mouthful of liquid that feels like the stuff they use to clean stained water-closets, and sitting up to facilitate its passage back to where it belongs—in his unhygienic crap-house of a heart—he is burned up with a great sour hate. This hate is different from the hates that have come and gone before. It is a slow, itchy, smouldering hate that oozes out of him in horrid yellow drops, and pollutes that which is most sacred and secret.