The Thousand Deaths of Mr Small (29 page)

Solly Schwartz then went away, looking disconsolate—while the Narwalls exchanged sly glances—and caught the express to London, where he cashed the cheque.

Mrs. Narwall, meanwhile, said to her husband: “Come on now—now is the time to go into production. Buy the cannery, buy the plant—buy fruit, everything, and take with both hands!”

Her husband replied: “I think, my dear, that you are right.”

“I know I’m right. Buy in, quick!”

So they did. They bought in the cannery, and everything else their money could buy. Within fourteen days the Philadelphia firm attacked the English market with a lower-priced product packed in a better can, wrapped in a better label, and the firm of Narwall crashed. It went down in sections, as one might say—inevitably—like a mill-chimney. And there were the Narwalls with two or three grocery shops in the south of England, and nothing more. They had always lived frugally, but their morale was eaten away. They had lost their accumulated capital. Their hearts were broken—at least Mr. Narwall’s heart was broken. He was a common tradesman again. Mr. Lumpitt got drunk out of sheer joy at the crash of this bloody tyrant. Solly Schwartz, having £200,000 in the bank, executed a gleeful hop-skip-
and-jump
, and went to Swaine and Adeney and bought a
boxwood
walking-stick that weighed about three pounds, curiously carved to represent clasped hands. The knob was a crude turquoise.

So it came to pass that Narwall moved southward and that, in making this move necessary, Solly Schwartz made rack and ruin of Charles Small’s life.

Try
and
tell
him,
go
and
try
and
explain!
He
did
what
he
wanted
to
do.
He
spoiled
my
life.
He
spoiled
my
life!
Good
luck
to
him!
cries Charles Small on his bed of pain—
Good
luck
to
him
for
spoiling
my
life,
because,
by
God,
he
had
a
great
soul!

*

Yes, he made and he broke people, that strange little man whom everyone considered as broken and improperly made. Shortly after the Narwall affair he went to Abel Abelard. Abelard was wrapped in a stained dressing-gown. The girl was wearing a camisole, as they used to call them. Solly Schwartz said to him: “Listen. The business is over and done with. But I’m going to tell you something. How much are you getting a week now?”

“Eh? How much? Nine pounds, I think.”

“You had a job. You haven’t got one. How do you like that?” asked Solly Schwartz.

Abel Abelard said: “Oh well, I don’t know, I don’t see that it makes such a great difference—do you?”

Nodding approvingly, Solly Schwartz said: “Quite right. Good attitude.” Then he looked at this tousled young man in his filthy, paint-bespattered studio, pinching the bottom of his slatternly mistress, and a kind of wonder came upon him. Solly Schwartz, the man of iron, was awe-struck by this man of straw. He looked at them again. They were caressing each other affectionately; he with his left hand on her knee, while he applied strokes of white to his great panel of the Burning of the Library at Alexandria.

How, wondered Solly Schwartz—he who had always lived and always would live in hidden dumps and furnished places … in any case, in furnished places—how was it possible to live like this? It may be, at that moment, that he was bitten by a nostalgia, an envy. He had intended to say to Abel Abelard:
Look
here.
It’s
all
over.
I
can’t
use
you
any
more.
Anyway,
I
can’t
pay
you
nine
pounds
a
week
any
more
because
the
business
is,
so
to
speak,
liquidated,
in
a
manner
of
speaking.
If
you
want
to
stay
on
for
a
retainer
of
a
fiver,
all
right.

Instead, he said: “Look here, Abelard. I’m going to tell you something. How much are you getting now? About nine quid?
Well, I’m going to make it ten. We are going into a new business. Advertising. I’m going to start you off at ten pounds a week, do you hear? And if, by Christ, you’ve got sense enough to find your arse to wipe it—excuse me, Madam—you’ll make thirty, forty, fifty! Do you hear?”

The girl said: “If he can find his arse to wipe it.”

Solly Schwartz blushed; he did not like to hear such words from the lips of ladies.

Abel Abelard said: “I don’t quite see what you mean, Mr. Schwartz. You have closed up your business, and raised my wages. Excuse me, but this doesn’t make sense to me.”

Solly Schwartz snapped:
“Schmerel!
You bloody fool—excuse me, Madam—what do you think I close a business for? Fun? I close one business,
schlemihl.
I close one business to open another business. What else for? Now, comes a new business. Stop messing about with your dirty paints and listen a minute, will you? Listen …” said Solly Schwartz, lowering his voice and balancing his great stick on his knees.

“Glass of beer, Mr. Schwartz?”

“No. Be quiet with your beer. Listen. You know what you’ve been doing with me the last year, two years? Making labels, posters?”

“I remember,” said Abel Abelard.

“Keep on,” said Solly Schwartz. “Keep on, Abel, as long as … able.” It occurred to him that he had made a joke. Abelard smiled politely; the girl screamed with laughter. Solly Schwartz went on dreamily: “Listen. You know me. I can eat you and your father’s father. Do you want to change grips with me? … No, no, no—I don’t want to damage your hand. Listen to me. I’m making a new business. Do you know what? I’ll tell you. Advertising. Do you know what that means?”

Abelard said: “Well, not exactly, but I should say that it was trying to induce people to buy things they didn’t really want.”

“Right!” said Solly Schwartz.

Teasing out his beard, and patting the girl’s bottom, Abel Abelard said: “You know, it might be fun.”

Solly Schwartz looked at him with fierce, astonished eyes, and said: “Fun? Fun? What do you mean,
fun?
What the bloody hell do you think I’m running—
Comic
Cuts?
Ally
Sloper’s 
Half-
Holiday
?
Weary
Willie
and
Tired
Tim?
Fun? Listen, you bloody fool. Have your fun here. With me, no fun. With me, no fun. Abelard,
work! You’re an artist. Artist, fartist—have bloody fun. Have fun with your women, but with
me
you have no fun. You work like a dog and you get paid like a lord. Out of my office have fun. In my office, if you do your job, you get the money to have fun. Is it clear? Is it agreed?”

His vehemence frightened them as much as his offer of ten pounds a week had impressed them. The girl looked at Abelard, nudged him, and nodded; and Abelard said: “Very well.”

When he was gone, Abel Abelard and his girl sighed, because the air felt lighter. Then, impelled by a sudden impulse, they made love together, before Solly Schwartz, resolutely limping, beating the paving stones with his heavy stick, disdaining cabs, reached the corner of the street. Giving the girl one of the
ten-pound
notes, Abelard said: “For God’s sake, slut, go and buy a dress and some underclothes!”

“Well,” she said, taking the money, “I could do with a dress, old thing, but underclothes … if you don’t mind, I’m not used to them, and you know it. What’s the matter with you? Just because you’re going into business you want me to wear
underclothes
? All your fine-feathered friends aren’t going to look up my skirts, I hope?”

“To the devil with your drawers, my darling! Amuse yourself, have fun.”

“I wonder why he was so angry just now when you talked about Fun.”

Abel Abelard said: “No idea, my dear, but … well, it might be that the little fellow is not having fun, or that his idea of fun isn’t mine. We’re rich. Wash your filthy face, and comb your hair, and I’ll take you, by God, to eat lunch at the Café Royal!”

*

So there came into being the Schwartz Advertising Agency, and Solly Schwartz was happy, because now he dealt in what he believed to be the most impermanent commodities—words and visual impressions—print, paper, illusion. It is remarkable that, considering the success of John Bunny and Bill Hart, he did not turn his keen mind to the cinema, to the selling of images, perpetually replaceable shadows. Considering the fabulous perspicuity of the man, one wonders why he did not hook his strong hands into Marconi, and make trade in air and sound. No, considering the matter, Schwartz chose the most appropriate
trade; here to-day, gone to-morrow, persuading the world to buy goods which other men had produced … employing artists to draw memorable pictures of lamps; hiring writers to put out prose descriptive of tables and chairs … lying cynically, and with a fistful of money persuading poor would-be-honest
craftsmen
to lie, and lie, and lie about toothpaste, cigarettes, soap,
five-shilling
watches, artificial silk stockings—all that was immediately consumable and, having been consumed, essentially replaceable.

Thus, Solly Schwartz, the cripple, a mighty man to help his friends, scratching his itch for power, became the father and begetter of liars and of lies.

*

So, through the years—not many years, only a few—Schwartz became a name, and Narwall became a mockery. The Narwalls came south partly because most of their shops were in the south of England, but mainly on account of the pride they had inspired in themselves, the hate they had inspired in everyone else, and the shame that came with the cracking of their pride. They dreaded the silent laughter and the unseen interchange of winks and nudges; they could not face the false smiles they knew so well—the smirking sympathy—the bland eyebrows which they had in their time so often opposed to ruined tradesmen in Slupworth.

It was not that they were ruined; only they had lost face and, knowing how much they were hated, hurried away out of earshot of the laughter, for they were Pride nicely fallen … especially Mrs. Narwall, the bitch, the beauty, the creature of ice. She would have stayed in Slupworth and braved it out if it had been murder. But Narwall, the mean weakling, the under-dog, found himself for the first time in his life in the right, and he made the most of it. He made it clear that she, his wife, was responsible for his crash. Confronted with what was, in fact, a bitter truth, she nodded—not bowed, but nodded—her proud head. So Mr. and Mrs. Narwall with their family, together with the faithful old servant, went to London.

To hear the lounging proletariat of Slupworth talk as they crossed and uncrossed their languid legs, leaning against the railings of the Library, you might have thought that the
so-bitterly-hated
Narwalls were tramping the roads of England with a barrel-organ, a monkey and a tin cup.

In point of fact, they owned four moderately prosperous shops in sound positions around Westminster. Occupying the upper part of a house over one of their shops—the very one which Mr. Lumpitt managed—they lived as well as, if not better than, they had lived before, although London was not Slupworth where they had been big fishes in a little pool.

Here was a great, roaring city. And even in this tremendous jungle of stone the Narwalls could not escape from Slupworth, because here, always, was Lumpitt, secretly smiling at their discomfiture.

Not long after it was necessary for Mrs. Narwall to demonstrate to Ivy certain facts and procedures that are generally
communicable
only between mothers and daughters, Mr. Narwall said: “No idle hands. To work. She must go to Business College. Yes, upon my word, Ivy must typewrite, she must short-hand, she must earn her bread!”

“Yes, Father,” said Ivy. So she went to a Business College, that flimsy little fool, that weak drink of milk….

Milk, milk, milk!
You
humpy
bastard,
you,
you
ruined
my
life!
Why
in
the
name
of
God
did
you
have
to
do
what
you
did
with
the
Narwalls?
Charles Small silently screams. Then, talking to a cloud in his mind, he says—still silently—
Ivy,
Ivy,
where
are
you
now,
Ivy,
my
one
and
only
love?

Where is she now? God knows. God knows? Idiot, idiot—she is in the telephone directory. She is living in state near Regent’s Park, bloated with money, blonde with chemicals, slender with careful starvation, flashing with jewels, dressed by Schiaparelli and Hartnell, and—he hopes and believes—bitterly unhappy.

There is more hate in Charles Small’s stomach than it can encompass. He is violently sick. The convulsion of his inside is such that he feels he is about to throw up something like a sack of potatoes. He retches, he strains, he bursts asunder … and out comes nothing but a mouthful of sour froth.

God is just. Froth. You cannot give more than you have … froth, froth … more loss, more dead loss!

… C
HARLES
S
MALL
sits up, looking for something to destroy, and all he can see is the eiderdown overlay, which he kicks as hard as he can. It curls up and coldly slaps him in the face. Then, pushing and kicking it away, he looks down into the china vessel that has received the contents of himself—bubbles, frothy bubbles, acrimonious acidulous water—sour emptiness. He knows perfectly well that downstairs his wife—oh, how he hates the shape of her nose, and how he has through the years yearned to change that shape with a quick blow!—his wife, who loves him and whom he hates, is exercising dictatorial influence on the children.
Daddy
is
ill.
And so, looking at the tablespoonful of pale froth which was all he had to offer to the chamber-pot, swallowing bile, Charles Small thinks of his wife and children and knows that even in his sickness and his silence he, the unhappy victim of a most dreadful tyranny, has himself become a dirty little tyrant … that his children will hate and despise him, pity him, avoid him, and ultimately be only too glad to bury him.

Swallowing the nausea that comes when he thinks of himself in relation to his wife and children—he who is all that he ever detested—he, the tyrant who abhors tyranny—Charles Small thinks with unutterable longing (that is to say, a longing he has never dared openly to utter) of Ivy Narwall, and he considers himself with such abhorrence that he wishes he had two faces so that he might spit in one.

He sees himself as the abject victim of sloppy wet pity, a sneaking Judas who sold true love for thirty easy tears … furtive Peter who denied the Christ at the moan of a dove—not even at the stern crow of a cock.

Oh, corruption upon corruption! Who is there in this world whom he does not hate? Above all, he hates Charles Small; and looking at himself, and spitting out some of the vile taste of
himself
—more froth, pities himself. Pitying himself now, he begins to be sorry for everyone. He does not exactly want to die. He wishes that he were young and of strong will.

Given strong will he might have been happy, and by virtue
of his strong will many other men and women might have found happiness. But he was weak, and out of his weakness has come interminable pain. Pain upon pain! Pain for himself, pain for his wife, and so for his children and his children’s children, unless God sends them enlightenment … pain for Ivy, and her husband and her children, and their children’s children … pain, pain! He sees himself now as the only begetter of woe and anguish, the poisoner of innumerable babes unborn. And he wishes that he was so constructed that he might kick himself in the arse for a fool.

*

Oh, how Charles Small reproaches himself, realising that by the pronunciation of one syllable—
NO!
—he might have altered the course of several lives in his generation and God knows how many beyond it. But he never learned how to say No, the little man—he never even learned how to say Yes. Here again come the misery and the hate. His mother and his father, whom he loves and detests, befuddled truth between them, blew hot and cold with the same breath. Liars and cowards, they brought into being this coward, this liar, this sour-gutted wretch on his
well-deserved
bed of pain, this frustrated fool, Charles Small, so angry with himself that he would destroy himself, if only he had the nerve, which he hasn’t.

He thinks of Tristan and Isolde, of Heloise and Abelard, of Palamon and Arcite, who gave everything for love. They fell in love, by Heaven—they pursued their love—they fought with bare steel for love, and they died for love. Rightly so. What was love? Everything. And death? Nothing … Aie, aie, aie—for the days of the strong man with the strong sword! … And oh, woe, woe betide this despicable generation of grocers, canners, accountants, advertisers, and other liars that won greatness through lies and deception … bought themselves brides with lies and illusions … woe, woe, utter black woe to this generation of paid liars, of which Charles Small, to his sour shame, is one!

*

How much in love is he, now, with dreamful death, this nostalgic idiot, who touched happiness with the silly tips of his timid fingers, the dirty coward, and had not the strength to close his hand and pick it up! When he thinks how happy he might
have been with Ivy Narwall, Charles Small curses himself as few men have cursed themselves before, from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet—he loathes himself with a bitter, terrible loathing. He sees himself blindfold and bound, strapped to a chair in a prison yard in a rainy dawn, while the firing squad falls into line to blast out of this world this wretch who has so abjectly betrayed himself, this utterly despicable recipient of 30 pieces of Nothing. And he wishes that he were of the firing squad … he derives a certain satisfaction from the fantasy of himself as he sees himself between the V of the back-sight and the bead of the fore-sight, taking aim at his own chicken-heart. No one in the world can be so repulsive to anyone in the world as Charles Small is to himself. Other men have given all for love, which, again, is everything; and he has given all for nothing, nothing. Now, since he lacks I. Small’s knack of talking himself into great expectations, having more objectivity in his little finger than that old fool had in his body, he knows himself for what he is—a sort of bifurcated turd, a dropping cursed with consciousness, afflicted with sentience so that he can smell himself, worse luck; dropped with strain and pain out of one bloody hole to go in shame and pain into another, into the dirt, where lies his grubby little destiny.

Now, he has a wild longing for Ivy, and a mad impulse to rush out and find her. In fact, he puts one foot on the floor, but then, in despair, he remembers that downstairs, tremulously listening to his every movement, lurk his fat, fair, slushy, lachrymose poultice of a wife and, bribed into silence, his nasty little children … dictators, tyrants, jailers, enemies!

So he gets back on to the bed. And here, God damn him, he will lie, and here, God blast him, he will die—soon, oh God, soon!—and from here he will be tucked up, hauled away, screwed into an unnecessarily expensive bit of joinery, and given to the worms. Declaiming inwardly under the reverberating dome of his echoing skull, Charles Small tells himself that a coward dies a thousand times before his death; a brave man never tastes of death but once. How many times, God help him, has he died? How many thousands of times, miserable coward, has he hurled his soul into the hole in the ground while his puny, cringing body withheld itself from the good, clean, white maggots!

Take
what
you
want,
said God—
and
pay
for
it.
Nonsense, utter nonsense! Charles Small is squirming in his little cell in hell
because he did not take what he wanted, because he took what he did not want, because he took that which was thrust upon him … so that here he lies, remembering and remembering….

So, you lose your reason. There is nothing like the critical contemplation of yourself to scatter your wits to the thirty-two points of the compass, God help your muddled little head!
Thus,
conscience
doth
make
cowards
of
us
all,
says Charles Small to
himself
, glancing at his reflection in the pier-glass. He is revolted at the sight of himself—young yet old; handsome, but falsely so, for he appears haughty and proud, but is nothing of the sort. He scowls at himself and sees nothing but a ham actor’s
presentation
of himself—and he throws something. It is a large cut-glass bottle of rose-water, which hits his reflection full in the face and, shattering itself, smashes the mirror into jagged shards. Now, at least, he has got rid of the need to look at himself. The noise, of course, is considerable. Charles Small found a certain
satisfaction
in chucking the cut-glass bottle at the plate-glass mirror … but then, with a certain trepidation, he hears the muffled clumping of stupid feet on the carpeted stairs. That idiot is trying to walk quietly again. He locks the door, and, when he hears her say: “Are you all right?” answers: “Leave me alone!”

Then, looking at the fragments of the broken mirror scattered on the floor, he sees all kinds of shifting, disconnected, fragmentary reflections of himself that he cannot put together to make one decent picture.

The dirty light dances on the splintered looking-glass, on the shadows of the room come to grips with the shadows of the encroaching night, against which the fading light fights to the death until the dark, at last, gets its thumbs in his eyes, and just before all goes black, he sees himself in the fragments of the broken mirror, like pieces of a child’s puzzle … scattered, incomplete.

Now the darkness is encompassing him, and Charles Small, in his trivial misery, assuages his poor little pain and tries to still his uneasy conscience by the memory of truly dreadful, black, unforgivable, unforgettable cowardice and treachery.

If he lives a thousand years—and, knowing that he is hoping in vain, hoping that he will not live out the night—he will never forget the unspeakable business in the railway station.

*

… That was when he went crazy, and forgot that his mother had borne him. That was when he behaved like a wild beast, and like the dirtiest little coward in the world, who should have been dealt with as dung—shovelled away with other filth and tossed out to feed nice clean green grass to feed comparatively courageous sheep.

He is thinking, naturally, of his passionate love for Ivy Narwall, and how he lost it in circumstances so revolting that if his
best-beloved
child, the girl, slipped in the street and fell in front of an approaching steam-roller, and Charles Small saw Ivy crossing the road, he would feel an impulse to run the other way and bucket up a side turning. And it would not surprise him in the least if he obeyed that impulse.

*

Oh, how he aches, how he aches, with his fever in every one of the 365 bones of his body! How he throbs through every
reticulation
of his innumerable nerves! What pain, what maddening pain, crawls around and around the endless convolutions of his brain—the brain which, if he were a man and had a gun should be like porridge on the floor, with a bit of bone and a splash of lead behind it…. Guns, so now he needs guns—as if he’d have the nerve to thumb back a hammer and press a trigger, the cheap little liar to himself!
If
you
want
to
die,
die,
God
damn
you!
says Charles Small to himself. But he has no instantaneous poison, no prussic acid, no quick, clean pistol—if he had the knowledge to use a pistol and had the guts to press a trigger, neither of which he has.

All this comes out of the Great Romance, the Narwall-Small Idyll, the great mad passion of Charles for Ivy, the wild
self-abnegatory
passion of Ivy for Charles. He cannot for the moment be bothered with what led up to the unthinkable filthy end of the matter—he can only think around and about that filthy end, on the platform at Sealford, with the little train
shuddering
and gasping, and a porter wearing a red tie trundling a
wobbling
tropical trunk, while a goods train that seemed to have no end rolled and rolled, grumbling and muttering, away and away for ever on the other line. Would God never send that last flash of light, the last dazzling flash that, burning through the jammed shutter of his memory, might burn into decent darkness the
clean-cut
images of that moment?

There lies the station in the dying daylight. There rolls the trolley, trundled by the disconsolate porter with the red tie. There rolls away the goods train, interminable, laden largely with coal, to make black smoke God knows where … and the wheels of the porter’s trolley go clickety-click while the porter’s heels, which are downtrodden, thump behind, and the Sealford train seems to be swelling itself with steam as a deep-sea diver fills himself with air before plunging into unknown darkness. Darkness indeed! Soon, night must fall. Oh, if only to God it had already fallen—if only he, Charles Small, could have scuttled into his mouse-hole under the cover of the dark at the approach of the Cat or if only he had been born a mouse, and Mrs. Narwall had really been a cat with a licence to kill him! … If only he and Ivy had been the pair of mice that they were—but alone—how gleefully, whisker-to-whisker and paw-in-paw, would they have darted into the darkness of the tunnel, nimbly skipping the metals, fearfully yet triumphantly flattening themselves against the sooty sleepers while the rolling-stock went past, too big to hurt them, so that they could pipe their little triumph over Juggernaut!

*

Here, thinks Charles Small, must be the most abject end to the most pitiful love story in the history of fear-haunted passion … miserable, mousey passion. Of the preliminaries he cannot bring himself at present to think: there is bile enough in his blood and self-digesting acid enough in his guts without that. And over it all, of course, hangs the sickening tang of sour maternal milk, so that he has half a mind to go downstairs and hit his wife in the face for the simple reason that she is the mother of two children.

It is not difficult for him to shove the beginning and the middle of the love story out of his mind, but the end, the end—that hangs over.

With the love story and its permutations and combinations he will torment himself later. At present, he is stuffed with
self-reproach
, and haunted by the memory of the railway platform at Sealford.

He and Ivy Narwall fell in love. (They would have made a pretty pair.) They fell in love and, after all kinds of machinations, decided to run away together, to Sealford first of all, where they
would get married. After that they intended to leave the country and go to South Africa, where they might make a new life, a brand-new life.