The Thousand Deaths of Mr Small (34 page)

This was a new one. I. Small shouted: “Sis a difference!” Then, to demonstrate to the boy his superstitious folly, he stirred up the privet leaves with a finger, saying: “See? What isn’t there isn’t. Education give them! Superstition!” At that moment a stick insect, presumably perturbed, leaped out of the privet leaves on to I. Small’s hand. The old man looked from the box to his hand, and from his hand to the box. The very leaves of the forest were reaching out to bite him. He made an ululation, aimed a blow at Charles—with an empty glove—and rushed away calling out for policemen, detectives, zoologists, etymologists, biologists, while the unhappy insect, foredoomed to death on the pavement, clung to the back of his hand. At the corner of the street he encountered a big policeman, under whose nose he extended his hand, with the terrified stick insect on the back of it, and said one word: “Quick!”

The policeman picked the insect off, crushed it between two fingers and said: “Yes?”

“Nothing,” said I. Small. After that he went home. He was ashamed. A common bleddy bobby had come to the rescue. Little Charles was to blame for his humiliation. All the same, the animal might have bitten him, poisonously. He composed himself before he reached the door of his house and, taking the cigar-box and holding it at arm’s length, burst into the kitchen, urged his wife to stand back, and thrust the box deep into the heart of the fire.

“What’s that for?” asked Millie Small.

I. Small, fumbling in the inside pocket of his mind for a coherent answer, replied: “Shush—they create mice!”

Later that evening Charles saw his old man, in heavy boots,
tightly wrapped up—he feared that the stick insects would run up his legs—prowling on tiptoe with a heavy rolling pin.

“Defeat,” he said at last; and, exhausted, fell into a heavy sleep.

*

So thinks Charles Small, because now he remembers the
outbreak
of the Great War in 1914. Charles Small, who was a boy at that time, was enthusiastic about the business. He was stirred when, after the Declaration, trolley-loads of able-bodied men rolled past, while the hot August air quivered to the shouting of: “Berlin in a month!” Everybody believed that the British troops and the French and the Belgians would be occupying Berlin in a month. This was not the case. Numerically superior, better-organised German forces drove the Old Contemptibles back out of Mons. After that the Englishmen, in their indignation, became terrible.

Into action rushed the flower of the flock—the many men so beautiful—out and out, to gasp themselves away in the gas; perish, ripped into rags under the box barrages; or go under in the mud.

Charles Small remembers that he wished he had been of military age. He was fired by the example of a pair of very distant relations—cousins three times removed—twins, nineteen years old, who had died like men on the Western Front.

Men so beautiful, indeed! The twins were big, light-coloured boys. They enlisted in some infantry regiment, because they were inseparable. Not long after the shambles at Vimy Ridge, in some bayonet engagement over the top, they both went down, but like men. Charles Small can visualise the scene: the dirty dawn, the icy mud; the issue of rum; the men shivering in the damp, while the young officers (we were always running short of them), with synchronised watches, counted the seconds …
Five
Seconds
to
go,
Men
—
Four
Seconds
—
Are
you
ready?
—
Three
Seconds
—
Two
—
One!
—
Over
the
Top!
—while the Company Sergeant-Major roared: “Over, you buggers—do you want to live for ever?”

He can see it as clearly as he can see the tastefully papered
bedroom wall, and hear it as clearly as he hears the hushing and shushing downstairs.

… In this dreary, hopeless dawn, the men advance, led by this little subaltern, who goes down under the first machine-gun burst before he has had time to raise a moustache—picked off, conspicuous, because he was carrying a revolver instead of a rifle. Oh for that mud, oh for that bitter dawn, and oh, oh, oh for the clean and beautiful end of those fine twins in the bloody mud of the trench!

They were first over, first in, happy warriors, confronting the enemy man-to-man with the naked steel. One of them, with a hand-grenade, silenced a machine-gun—for which he received a D.C.M. (posthumous). His brother was at his shoulder, fighting with bayonet and butt. The rest of the platoon leaped down, howling like devils, but a German reinforcement had come rushing up, and the German grenades began to burst, and the
machine-guns
started to stutter, so that the English were driven back thirty yards—good God!—to their front-line trench, with the sergeant-major, hitherto hated but now mourned, lying
disembowelled
, his hands locked in the throat of a junior German officer with an Iron Cross. The twins stayed. One of them was down—the one who had thrown the grenade, the first one in—and the other, who could not leave him, picked him up and tried to carry him in his arms to the home lines. Carrying exactly his own weight, more—because his brother was already dead, and the dead are heavy—he managed to wallow ten yards through the mud, before the German machine-gunner of the reinforcements squeezed his trigger, and the brothers went down, shot through and through, and lay in a comradely attitude, arm about neck, black with the bloody mud, but clean, sublime …

… While Millie Small was making a fuss about smuts of soot on Charles’s nose, and spitting on her handkerchief to scrub them off, and I. Small, pinning up a poster saying
Your
King
and
Country
Need
You,
“bleddied” away, leaping like a grasshopper, because he had wounded himself with a thumb-tack….

At the same time, others were beginning their military careers. There was indescribable consternation in the family. Casualties were terrible. Man-power was short, and in urgent demand. I. Small (and if he was Man-Power, gallstones were jewellery) received a paper requiring him to turn up for a medical
examination
.

Millie Small had hysterics and wet herself. I. Small, deathly pale, shaking, as he afterwards said, like “an aspirin leaf”, threw out his chest and bellowed: “What the bleddy beggary! All is fair in love and—what’s-’er-name?—war! You can only die once, twice, schmice! Give me a bleddy rifle!”

Nathan, the Photographer, who also was called up, had a trick worth two of anyone else’s. He sat up for three days and three nights, drinking highly concentrated black coffee, so that when he arrived, haggard and wan, at the office of the medical officer, he had palpitations, and was rejected, because of a weak heart—after which, having slept twenty-four hours, he began to make a small fortune photographing men in uniform.

The estate agent, Ruth’s husband, lost his nerve and did something drastic. He had learned that if you swallowed the cordite contents of a cartridge you temporarily developed all the symptoms of chronic heart disease. So he got hold of a Short Lee-Enfield bullet and devoured the contents of it, which worked to such effect that he died in agony.

Pearl’s husband went to Ireland, where he incarcerated himself in a kosher boarding-house in Dublin, and returned when all was safe, talking of the “throubles”.

I. Small—trust him to louse everything up—consulted the atheistic cobbler, who told him that glycerine was dangerous, because it was an ingredient of nitro-glycerine. So he went to a chemist and, speaking behind his hand, ordered a shilling’s-worth of glycerine. This was another Occasion. It was on a Friday night, after Mrs. Small had set light to the Sabbath candles. I. Small could not eat his supper. He sat with a little bottle of glycerine in front of him, brooding. Charles Small remembers that he and his sister were packed off to bed. But he crept
downstairs
and peered through a crack in the door.

I. Small uncorked the little bottle.

“Not near the candles!” hissed Mrs. Small, “it can go off.”

“Bleddy beggary!” cried I. Small, knocking over his chair. He retired to a neutral corner of the room, and drained the little bottle of glycerine, retching and groaning. He felt, now, the need for a smoke; but after he had put a cigarette in his mouth, Millie knocked the match-box out of his hand, crying: “So that’s what he is! He wants to blow the place up!” In her trepidation she even blew out the Sabbath candles.

Later, I. Small, with a noise that roused the neighbourhood,
regurgitated a shilling’s-worth of glycerine. Millie Small followed him into the lavatory. His convulsions were terrible—not unlike those of a dying sperm whale.
Erhook!
—
Erhook!
—One might have expected ambergris. There came out nothing but a thin stream of colourless liquid. When it was all over he struck a match to see what monstrosity he had thrown out. Mrs. Small again knocked the match-box out of his hand, crying: “So that’s what he is! Does he want to blow us up?”

Under stress of emotion, I. Small broke wind with the noise of a bugle.

“You see?” said Mrs. Small in an ominous voice.

The old man fell into a heavy, exhausted sleep.

Next day, although he complained of bad eyes, bad nerves, bad stomach, constipation, diarrhœa, deafness, a weak heart, a snotty nose, and peculiar feet, he was passed as A-1, and put into the Army. The fact of the matter is that the old man was as strong as a horse.

Mrs. Small, after having made such noises as cause men to throw boots at bereaved cats in the dead of night, was on the whole proud of her husband’s conscription. She baked cakes, cooked chickens, made pies, bottled fruits, sent huge parcels to some barracks in the south of England.

One day, a few weeks later, the old man turned up in uniform. He had always been a fastidious man with his clothes. Now he was terrific. His puttees were just so. His tunic fitted him like a glove. He had got someone to set up his cap, his boots shone like black diamonds, and his fierce moustache tickled his cheek-bones. Over all, there was an air of indefinable bleddy command.

“Srul, are you an officer?” asked Mrs. Small.

I. Small replied, in a sergeant-major’s voice: “Officer, schmofficer! Not if you paid me!”

“Srul, what are they doing to you? What are you doing? Do you get enough to eat?”

“Hm! A cup tea, Millie?”

Tea was ready. I. Small ate and drank with a military air. After tea Millie Small asked again: “What are you doing?”—for she had a new respect for this martial figure.

Brushing crumbs from his moustache, I. Small said, with some pride: “I am bleddy-well boot-maker for the bleddy battalion! … What does she mean—‘Hmm?’ … What does she mean—‘So that’s what I am!’ … What’s the matter, what, miv a
boot-maker? What does she think a bleddy army marches on? Its stomach?”

So I. Small, in a state of outraged dignity, retired into his shell, his little brittle shell. Mrs. Small, who had made all sorts of noises and messes when she heard the news of his conscription, and was already preparing to have her clothes dyed black, was indefinably disappointed, because he had a safe job, and humiliated because this job was a cobbler’s job; and not the West-End trade at that.

It happened that during I. Small’s seven-day furlough,
something
occurred in London that was unprecedented in that century. Enraged mobs arose with intent to destroy—not to pillage or plunder, simply to destroy. The casualty lists had been coming in. Everyone over military age wanted to do something about it. Middle-aged men saw the boys gassed, gutted by howitzer shells, or, as the soldiers sang, hanging on the old barbed wire …

Everybody wanted to do something to a German. There was a movement afoot to forbid the playing of Beethoven’s symphonies. The proletariat took direct action; they went for anyone with a German name. Bewildered bandsmen, veterans of the
Franco-Prussian
War, were beaten over the head with their own bombardons.

One aged Uhlan, who had had his brains blown out at Sedan, and never missed them—a skilful carpenter who was employed by the Moss family—an aged man with a white beard more than a foot long, was denounced as a Spy. Spy! He could not have espied his hand in front of his eyes. He was manually dexterous, but practically witless; absent-minded. Sometimes, planing a plank, he would forget when to stop, and end up bewildered in a heap of shavings, with no plank. Every year, up to 1914, he attended a Meeting of Veterans: they drank seidels of Muenchner Loewenbrau, guzzled pig’s feet and sour kraut, sang
“Ach,
du
lieber
Augustin”
and the
“Lorelei”,
and got drunk more with sentiment than alcohol. This old man, Betsendorfer, accused of espionage and pro-German sympathies, touched his heaving bosom with a gnarled finger, said: “Who? Me?”—and dropped dead.

Charles Small remembers the leader of a German band. In a shabby, frogged uniform, he used to lead a handful of seedy-Teutons in even shabbier, frogless uniforms up and down the street, all of them blowing trumpets, tubas, and trombones, until people gave them money on condition that they went elsewhere. Charles remembers this man with a certain nostalgia. On very hot days he and his friends would walk in front of the band,
backwards
, ostentatiously sucking lemons. The bandsmen’s mouths would water, and there followed a bubbly confusion. This band leader finally bribed them to lay off. He was an ox-headed Swabian named Krauss. They clapped him and his crew into an internment camp, where, for several years, they mournfully blew abominable travesties of Schubert until their compatriots practically lynched them. Krauss took to carving beef bones into flower vases, but even at this he failed. He languished, and emerged, a broken man, an artist who had discovered his
limitations
.