The Thousand Deaths of Mr Small (18 page)

Solly Schwartz bought a bottle of gin, two quarts of beer, and a shillingsworth of fish and chips. The stranger waited outside the public-house saying: “Eh … the last time I came here they treated me with discourtesy. In fact they threw me out. Will you forgive me if I do not accompany you?” When Solly Schwartz came out with the bottles he said: “… However, I will, since you are so pressing, drink a little of the excellent gin which you have been so good to offer me”—and, uncorking the bottle and putting it to his lips, he swallowed about a quarter of a pint of the neat spirit before recorking it, and saying: “There never was such Heliogabalian hospitality! I am deeply obliged to you, sir. Pray allow me to return it. My rooms are yours.”

A
S
the lock clicked and the rusty hinges groaned, the basement room seemed to open a square black mouth in an asphyxiated yawn, sighing out a hot, stale breath. Then a match flared and Mr. Goodridge, followed by his horrible shadow, made his way through the narrow lanes between shadowy piles of mysterious lumber, and then became invisible until, with the noise of a man spitting out an orange pip an antiquated gas-burner relieved itself of a jet of yellow flame shaped like a duck’s foot. The unhealthy light of this feeble flame seemed to be shivering with cold in spite of the stuffy heat—and as Mr. Goodridge turned the gas higher it made a chattering noise as it tremulously slapped and scratched the great black face of the night. “Do come in, my dear sir. This is not exactly the palace at Versailles, or Windsor Castle; Versailles and Windsor, after all, are open to the general public. This place is not. His Majesty the King receives. I do not. So, although I cannot offer you velvet arm-chairs or Gobelin tapestries——” Mr. Goodridge conducted his guest into the room and shut—and double-bolted—the door.

By then Solly Schwartz’s eyes had adjusted themselves to that wired, gaslight-haunted half-dark, and, hugging his beer bottles and holding his packet of fish and chips in such a manner that the oil it exuded would not stain his cuff, he looked about him. There was a window to the right of the door, but it was shuttered and barred, and the bar was secured with a great padlock. Close by this window stood a long table with a sloping top, covered with great sheets of cartridge paper and littered with drawing instruments—ivory-handled compasses and dividers, ivory
slide-rules
, ivory T-squares—worth a nice few pounds, Solly Schwartz observed. On the floor, to the left of the desk, there was a heap of torn up and crumpled paper, enough to fill two bushel baskets, and by the size and the shape of this heap Solly Schwartz knew that for many weeks past his host had been writing at that table, throwing away what he had written, and kicking it impatiently aside. The fireplace on the other side of the room was choked with
the ashes of burnt paper. Draughts from the door of a chimney had scattered a good bucketful of these ashes over the floor, which was dangerous with heaps of iron and brass cut into bewildering shapes. An engineer’s bench filled a third of the room, and when he looked at it in the light that flickered through the fog in the basement Solly Schwartz felt as he had once felt when he had walked into a lamp post in a black fog. He knew that the big iron thing was a hand-lathe, and that the smaller one was a vice, but all the rest of the paraphernalia—callipers, files, bits of brass, saws, spanners, screwdrivers, hammers—burst like the shower of sparks that the lamp-post had knocked out of his head. Instinctively, he looked towards the gas-jet, and one of the fingers of flame, tipped with a long black nail of shadow, pointed to a pile of books so that he read the word
MATHEMATIC
—before the gas-jet quivered away, raising its webbed hand to the ceiling, as if in supplication, chattering. It seemed to be saying: “I am so tired. Please send me back to my pipe. I am afraid of the dark. Please let me go out.”

Mr. Goodridge, in his urbane way, said: “It is possible that you may find it a little untidy here.”

“Not at all,” said Solly Schwartz.

“Yes, I admit that the place is not quite as tidy as it might be, but what can I do? I could get a woman to come and clean up, but she would put this here, that there, the other somewhere else, until … in short, I could not trust a woman to leave things alone if she tidied up. Myself, I have so little time away from my work. But do sit down, Mr…. Mr….”

“Schwartz, Mr. Goodridge.”

“Do forgive me. I am … distrait. Do sit down.” The only chair in the room was the chair by the sloping desk. Solly Schwartz balanced himself on the edge of it, while his host sat on the bench, saying, in a vague, amnesiac way: “I think I had some plates, and glasses—cups, at least—but for the life of me. … Oh yes, yes, the cups I used when I mixed——”

“That’s quite all right, Mr. Goodridge, I’ve had my supper. You eat that up before it gets cold.”

“You really are very kind. With your permission, I will. Working, one forgets the demands of the body. Oh dear, how badly designed is man, who must waste valuable time eating, sleeping, and so forth! I tried to reduce my sleeping and eating time to three hours. I couldn’t do it. Try as I will, I must sleep
six hours. Think of that. I’m fifty-two years of age. For
fifty-two
years I have been sleeping six hours a day. I have therefore slept thirteen years of my life away. So much time lost—but you are not drinking, my dear sir! Naturally, you have no glass. Perhaps this will serve?” He offered a tin can.

“Certainly,” said Solly Schwartz, filling it with beer, although he intended not to drink out of it. Then, looking at the can he said: “This is a funny tin, isn’t it?”

At that moment there was a sharp metallic snap and a shrill squeak of terror, and Mr. Goodridge leapt up, baring his four orange-coloured teeth in an awful grin, and said: “I’ve got another one!” He plunged into the shadows under the sloping table and came back with a wire contrivance shaped like the toe of a Dutch wooden shoe. It was a tiny cage that imprisoned a trapped mouse. The bait, a piece of cold fried potato, was still clasped in the mouse’s forepaws. “I am overrun with mice,” said Mr. Goodridge. “I have been at a loss to know what to do—or at least I was, until I devised this little trap. I detest those barbarous contraptions of wood and springs that they sell in the ironmongery shops. They break the mouse’s back. This catches the mouse alive.”

Solly Schwartz, watching Goodridge, shuddered. It came into his mind that Goodridge ate live mice, but he said: “What do you want to catch them alive for?”

“My dear sir! Obviously, in order to let them go.” Then, addressing the mouse, Mr. Goodridge said: “Now I have warned you. If you invade my privacy and devour my property you are liable to imprisonment or death. Is that clear? Be warned, and go about your business!” Then he opened the trap and let the mouse fall to the floor. The mouse, stunned, sat still. Goodridge blew at it, saying
Shoo,
and it ran away. “I beg your pardon,” he said, “the mice here are sometimes very troublesome. I try to reason with them, but, upon my word, they are occasionally more refractory than you might believe. My dear sir, will you not partake of your own bounty? Are you quite sure?”

He had been eating voraciously with his fingers, and there were five chips left.

“No thanks,” said Solly Schwartz,

“Oh well,” said Mr. Goodridge, eating four of the chips. He was about to eat the fifth, when he paused, took it out of his mouth, and baited the mousetrap again.

“What’s the idea of catching mice just to let them go again?” asked Solly Schwartz.

“Oh, I catch them to teach them a lesson, and I let them go in order that they may perhaps do better.”

“And then they come back?”

“Oh no, I think not.”

“But if they don’t come back to you, they’ll go to someone else, won’t they?”

“I really don’t know, Mr. Schwartz. I give them time to mend their ways. I really am not interested. I have so many other things to think of…. I think I will avail myself——”

“—Do, do!”

Mr. Goodridge drank out of the bottle and said: “It was Ralph Waldo Emerson, I believe, who said that if a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbour, though he builds his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door. Do I misquote?”

“I imagine not,” said Solly Schwartz.

“I have a great admiration for Mr. Emerson. A fine writer, a profound thinker. But … as you see, in the little matter of mousetraps, not infallible. But it doesn’t matter, does it? Mousetraps are not important, are they?”

“Oh I don’t know. If you want one you’ve got to buy one, and it costs you tuppence.”

“Oh that, oh yes, yes. Tuppence, yes, I grant you. But of no real importance to mankind, I think you will admit?” said Mr. Goodridge, trying to scratch an unreachable part of his back. “After all, there is no real harm in a mouse. It is a little naughty sometimes—it eats one’s things, and when it makes its nest in one’s waste paper it makes an irritating noise that can break the thread of a thought, if one happens to be thinking. But they mean no harm. They do not march in armies against their own kind. They do not go out and shoot inoffensive elephants. Do they?”

“Well, I suppose not,” said Solly Schwartz, humouring him. “But they’re dirty.”

“Dirty? Are they? Oh well, I dare say they find it difficult to keep clean in the conditions in which they are compelled to live. But what of it? The landlord of the public-house in which you purchased this excellent gin in which I am about to drink
your very good health said that
I
was dirty. It is true that I have little time to devote to a pernickety toilet, and little money to spare for fripperies—perfumes, toilet waters, soaps,
dressing-cases
, towels, sponges, all that kind of thing, but would you
therefore
bait a snare with, say, a glass of gin and break my back? I sincerely hope not. In fact I am sure that you would not.”

“Of course I wouldn’t. Why don’t you have another drink, Mr. Goodridge?”

“Since you are so pressing,” said Mr. Goodridge, drinking out of the bottle, “I don’t mind if I do…. We were speaking of mousetraps. I assure you, my dear Mr. Schwartz, that the world has beaten no path to my door for the sake of my mousetrap. I am reminded of an occasion when, being in urgent need of the wherewithal to purchase a little platinum wire, I offered my
mousetrap
for five pounds to a firm that manufactures such things, and they slammed the door in my face.” He laughed, as a man laughs at himself in comfortable reminiscence.

“Did you get your wire?”

“Oh yes, yes. The platinum wire? Of course, I got
that
—it was necessary for me, you see.”

“You managed to raise the money, did you?”

“Eh? Raise the money? Well, yes, because I have, you see, a regular income of a hundred and fifty pounds a year. It was necessary only to curb my appetites for a few days, and there was the five pounds. But the flesh, you know, is weak, and once in a while—as, for example, to-night, this weak flesh cries out for a mild debauch, and——” Mr. Goodridge took another drink of gin.

Solly Schwartz asked: “So you didn’t sell your mousetrap. And what about your salt-shaker, eh?”

“I beg your pardon? Salt-shaker? … Oh, that silly little thing!” said Mr. Goodridge, laughing. “You are referring to the suggestion I threw out in that fish shop, is that it?”

“Yes, what about that?”

“I shall certainly never patronise that establishment again and, in drinking your health, my dear sir, may I thank you for the loyalty with which you stood by me?”

“Don’t mention it. Good health,” said Solly Schwartz,
pre-tending
to touch the tin can with his lips. “You were telling me about that salt-shaker—with the spring.”

“Pay no attention to it, my dear friend, don’t give it a thought.
If you take such things seriously you’ll break your heart. You must understand,” said Mr. Goodridge, “that a man of active mind sometimes relieves that mind of a weight by turning it to a triviality; just as, it might seem, the North Sea amuses itself in the Norwegian fjords. So I, when the tide of my mind ebbs—when my moon wanes—so I play with a trivia. I amuse myself with cruets, gas-brackets, pots and pans, locks and bolts,
anything
that catches my eye. How many times have I made a sort of
voyage
autour
de
ma
chambre
,
devising improvements upon this, that, and the other. Ha-ha-ha! Childish, you may say—unprofitable—yes. But a man must find some form of recreation especially when he finds himself in an impasse. I have not the slightest doubt, my dear sir, as a man of intellect, you have found yourself in one of these intellectual blind alleys after a protracted period of labour. Oh dear me, the silly things I have thought of!”

“What silly things?” asked Solly Schwartz, eagerly.

“Oh well, that silly salt-cellar, for instance. And—you’ll laugh at me, and I don’t blame you—that tin out of which you are drinking, and which, incidentally, I should be happy to replenish…. You are not a mathematician, by any chance?”

“I’m afraid not. Tell me about the tin.”

“Hah, the tin—that tin! Well, my dear sir,” said Mr. Goodridge between two gulps, “less than three months ago I found myself hopelessly mystified by the unaccountable action of a certain device that was intended to control the movement of a certain wheel. You must forgive me if I do not offer to go into details. Let us say simply that I was mystified. Of course, it was simply that my mind was tired, because the work upon which I am engaged is of the first magnitude, and no one can possibly help me, so that I must work all alone. However, I stopped work in despair and, having prudently laid in some bread and a tin of salmon, I forced myself away from my work and sat down to refresh myself a little. In opening the tin I cut my finger. It occurred to me, then, that while it is an excellent thing to pack meat and fish in tin cans, the method of opening these cans is barbarous. To get at one’s Pink Salmon, I thought, one had to risk life and limb. It was necessary for the housekeeper to carry tools, ironmongery, tin-openers. In a Utopian state, I thought, tins would open themselves. Then, having put some cobwebs on my cut finger-—there is nothing better than a cobweb for a cut finger—I lay down and thought all night, worrying at the possibility
of a self-opening tin can; or at least a safe tin can so devised that there would be no need for women and children to risk their life’s blood for a bit of salmon or a preserved peach. By
daybreak
I had discovered the very thing—and believe me, the intense thought I had given to this silly, trivial thing had so completely taken my mind away from that which had been baffling it that I went back to work delightfully refreshed and solved my problem within five minutes.”