The Thousand Deaths of Mr Small (27 page)

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 …

B
UT
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.

Now, people were people, human beings of a sort, and therefore
everything that was most important to them, purchasable only with their blood, sweat and (same thing) money, was doomed to the ash-tray, the ash-can, the cesspool, or some dark hole in the ground. He lit another cigarette and considered the burned match. There you were again! Matches. People couldn’t get along without them. The poorest of the poor had to spend his begged or borrowed or sweated-for penny on a few seconds of flickering flame. One puff, and they were in the dark once more, and all was to do again; another penny must be found. So it was with candles.

What was a candle? Half a farthing’s worth of stearine and paraffin, bought for a halfpenny for the sake of an hour’s freedom from the blackness of the night. Or ink—people had to write, and stroke by stroke the penny bottle of blue-black emptied itself.

Ink reminded him of paper, another highly destructible commodity. What happened to all the paper in the world? Pondering this, he decided that on the whole the best kind of paper to sell must be newspaper and toilet paper—the two kinds most in demand—but not wallpaper, which stuck for years … Solly Schwartz was enjoying this little meditation. He thought of pins and needles, and remembered Cohen’s workshop. Cohen was a careful man with pins, yet every week or two he would have to buy another big box of these elusive, essential inches of pointed wire…. Pins, needles, thread, pencils, flowers, soap. Soap: however thoroughly you washed you got dirty again, and had to spend a little more of your sweat to purchase the wherewithal to lather it away….

Somewhat tired, he rested his rugged chin on the ornate handle of his walking-stick and thought dreamily and happily of man’s perpetual crying need for things that must day after day
disappear
into the air or be washed away back into the earth and must always be bought and paid for in hard cash.

He lit another cigarette and smiled at the smoke. Like
everyone
else he had lusted after smoke; had denied himself a
pennyworth
of fish and chips for the sake of five cigarettes for a penny … A pennyworth of smoke and ashes. True, fish and chips went the way of all replaceable things. But fish and chips gave a man strength. Fish and chips, especially on a cold night, lent a man the courage and the power to face another day, and achieve great things; whereas smoke begot nothing but a yearning for more smoke, and was productive of nothing. A bad habit, a bad
taste in the mouth, a stale smell, a cough. Now, Solly Schwartz looked angrily at his cigarette. He was smoking Dimitrinos, an expensive brand. In the sealed compartment the fragrant smoke went up in a diaphanous blue ribbon, gently weaving, until it spun itself away into the close air and disappeared. And all for Dimitrino! Solly Schwartz dashed the cigarette to the floor and ground it to dust under his iron foot. Then he took from his pocket the box with its Egyptian Government stamp, and threw it out of the window. It landed, he guessed, on a siding about ten miles out of Euston, where some delighted sucker would pick up the packet and suck smoke out of it, making ashes and dust to enrich Dimitrino; giving more power to his weakness; dribbling a few more pennies out of his pay envelope into the pockets of W.D. & H.O. Wills, John Player, Godfrey Phillips, and all the rest of them. He kept his cigarette-case filled, and his cigar-case too—for fools—but from that moment Solly Schwartz never smoked again.

As soon as the collector snatched away his ticket, he hobbled, respectably dressed as he was, to a fish shop in the Euston Road, and ate fish and fried potatoes voraciously and, between mouthfuls, thought of Goodridge, with his high sweet voice and his air of putrefaction—Goodridge, with his blackened nails and brain of crystal, Goodridge with his deft, delicate, filthy hands, making fine diagrams on a greasy marble table and expounding ever so gently the mysteries of strange machines.

The memory of Goodridge took away his appetite. All the same, Solly Schwartz finished his meal—he had eaten
eight-pennyworth
—threw down one-and-six, and went out in a bad temper. Here was what came of being over-eager, too generous. If he had kept Goodridge on beer, he might have had the Calculating Machine, as well as a lousy tin can. It was true that anyone who had an opponent by the belly had the death-grip; and Solly Schwartz had the world in a powerful grip, in the guts. Still, if he had not been so impetuously generous, he might have had this same world by the brain; he might have taken hold of Calculation by its … by its quadratic equations.

He went home, feeling, as he expressed it, flatter than a saucerful of cold piss, and slept like a dead man. But next morning he leaped up at seven o’clock; strapped on his iron foot; paced the floor, thinking, for half an hour; put on a
conspicuous
suit with a red over-check and a pearl Trilby hat, took
hold of a cane, the ivory handle of which was carved in the shape of a voluptuous mermaid, and went to see Abel Abelard.

*

He knew that people like Abel Abelard were not early risers. Still, such was his impatience, he reached Fitzroy Square at ten o’clock in the morning and poked impatiently with the ferrule of his stick at the scarred and blistered studio door. Which, to his astonishment, swung open. Abelard was awake, inspired, working at his great picture of The Destruction of the Library at Alexandria. The slatternly girl was posing stark naked, bending backwards in the grip of a lay-figure. Every muscle in her body expressed strain and anguish, and her tousled hair hung over her face and down her back in wild twists and strands. At the end of one stray wisp dangled a celluloid “slide” (now, Solly Schwartz reflected, they call them bobby pins … more costly detritus—more to be bought and lost, more to be paid for and thrown away). Her face was twisted with anguish, but her eyes were blankly happy, while, through her pouting lips, came a bubbling noise adjusted to the rhythm of “She’s Only A Bird In A Gilded Cage”. In her dangling left hand she held the smouldering half of a home-made cigarette.

Solly Schwartz, having made a mental note of the hair-clip, touched Abelard with his stick. The artist turned, palette in left hand and brush in right, his face full of menace. The tip of the brush was red. Solly Schwartz laughed, and struck it out of his hand with a flick of his stick, saying: “Come on,
trottel,
put a sock in it. Do you want a job, or don’t you?”

Abelard said: “Oh, it’s you, is it? I was working. I had an inspiration, Mr…. Mr….”

“—Schwartz, Mr. Schwartz. To hell with your inspiration!
Schwartz!
… Tell her to go and get dressed. Put down that board of paints—you’re dirty enough already—it’s running down. I want to talk to you.”

Turning his head, Abelard said to the girl: “Put something on, darling.”

“Oh good!” she said, and, shamelessly stretching herself, strolled away, while the lay-figure, folding like a carpenter’s ruler, fell into a kneeling position, hands outstretched as if in worship.

“I had an idea——” Abelard began.

“Idea be buggered,” said Solly Schwartz. “
I’ve
got an idea. Put that bloody board down for a minute, do you mind? Put it away. I want a word.” He looked with distaste at the only empty chair, and, although he was tired, said: “I’ll stand. It won’t take a minute. Listen. You want work?”

“I
am
working,” said Abelard, pointing to the canvas.

“I mean
work”
said Solly Schwartz. “I mean
work,
regular hours, for money.
Work!”
he said leering at the canvas. “Is this work? What do you get out of such work? Work! … I mean seven pounds a week regular. That’s what I call work. Well?”

Abelard could only say: “Well?”

“Listen,” said Solly Schwartz.

“Do you mean seven pounds a week every week?” asked Abelard.

“Seven pounds a week every week to begin with. Later, if you do the job, ten, twelve, fifteen, twenty——”

“Would you like a glass of beer, Mr. Schwartz?”

“No. Listen. You remember those labels you done for me?”

Abel Abelard laughed and said: “Oh, those! That was nothing….”

“Oh, those,” said Solly Schwartz. “That was nothing, eh? And by you the pay was nothing? Give me an honest answer. No, don’t waste your breath, save it. Sit down.”

Abelard sat down, saying: “Yes, but what is all this about seven pounds a week?”—fumbling at his little beard with an irresolute hand.

Cumulatively, from petty deal to petty deal, there had grown in the hunchback’s head a terrifying realisation of the brevity of life. There was so much to do, so little time. Now he felt as some fisherman might feel who, angling in a little boat on a wide sea lit by a sinking golden sun, feels the jerking of the hook in the jaw of a monstrous fish—and plays it and plays it, gritting his teeth and holding the slippery rod with all his might and main while the reel irresistibly rolls and the taut wet line slides away—the big fish is invisible; the line is unreliable; the light will not last; time is short, dreadfully short—but his will and his pride ordain that between the twilight and the dark, upon this fine thread, he must pull in a monster.

He struck his iron foot impatiently with his heavy cane. Abel Abelard drew a sketch of him from memory a little later—a
head, brilliantly expressive of courage, vanity, and blind pride—a flattened head, curiously satanic with a crunched-up, irritable, irascibly smiling mouth and deadly little watchful eyes.

Solly Schwartz said: “Be quiet. Listen.” He looked for a moment at the great canvas, shrugged his high shoulders and went on, “That
scheiss
won’t pay your rent. This
scheiss
will.” He took out of his pocket one of his tin cans, wrapped in one of Abelard’s labels. “I want more. I want more and more. I want labels for everything—I want labels for cherries, strawberries, plums, greengages, apples, pears, pineapple, anything you can think of. I want labels for fish, sausages, ham, beef, stew. I want labels for asparagus. I want labels, by God, I want labels for everything! I want posters to stick on walls—big ones, little ones, large ones, small ones! I want showcards for shops—you know, cardboard showcards—so they can hang ’em up, stand ’em up, stick ’em up. Like you did those labels, see? Delicious, works of art, to make your mouth water. Do you understand? I want big posters….” Solly Schwartz tried to extend his arms beyond the bounds of the studio.

“Forty-eight sheets,” said Abelard.

“Forty-eight sheets, fifty-eight sheets; so long as they make the
trottel’s
mouth water! Little ones——”

“Double-crowns?”

“That’s right, double-crowns. Double. That’s the idea. Colours. But I want them real, real, you understand, like a photograph. Gooseberries, take gooseberries. I want gooseberries, little green gooseberries and big red gooseberries—but I want to see every bloody hair on every one of those bloody gooseberries—every leaf!”

“Lea … leaf …” said Abel Abelard, thoughtfully. “If you want realism, you know, mightn’t it be a good idea to have, say, a caterpillar on——”

“Talk sense!” said Solly Schwartz. “Caterpillars. Who buys tinned caterpillars? Butterflies! Coloured butterflies.”

“Same thing, in the long run,” said Abelard. “A butterfly is nothing but a caterpillar with a pair of wings.”

“Same thing, eh? What would you rather have—a houseful of caterpillars of a houseful of butterflies?”

“Butterflies, I suppose.”

“Then if you like, butterflies. No caterpillars, understand?” Solly Schwartz hesitated a moment and then said: “Just a minute.
Just a minute. It could be a good thing to have a trademark. A butterfly …”

Abelard handed him an album, saying: “Here are pretty nearly all the moths and butterflies in the world. Take your choice.”

Solly Schwartz turned the pages and at last stopped, marking with his horny thumbnail a gaudy and magnificent insect with wonderful wings. “This one,” he said.