The Thousand Deaths of Mr Small (46 page)

The memory of all this is about as much as Charles can bear. His mind grows confused. Suddenly he finds himself laughing quietly and singing:

At this he laughs outright. It is too damned funny for words. A boy’s worst enemy is his mother. First of all, impelled by an uncontrollable compulsion to couple with her ally, his father, she squeezes him out into the world, and, blast her, makes a virtue of necessity. It is possible to forgive a woman for having borne you, but not for having ruined you.
Best
Friend,
my
arse,
thinks Charles Small;
My
worst
enemies
should
have
such
Best
Friends!
The child is the victim of its begetters, trained with blows, bamboozled with threats, cajoled with promises, bitched and bewildered with lies, poisoned with pity. Oh, parents, parents, parents—how he hates them, fools that they are, saboteurs! That which they produce, they smash, the wreckers! …
In
this
head,
he thinks,
were
all
the
glories
that
were
Greece,
the
grandeurs
that
were
Rome,
the
nobility
that
was
England,
and
all
the
capacity
to
marvel,
to
dream,
and
to
act
that
drove
fine
men
to
charm
magic
casements
opening
upon
the
foam
of
perilous
seas…
. It is
madness, nothing but madness, this craze of Man to make Man in his own image—this God-intoxication—this desire of hairy babies to coax, gouge, and pound flesh and blood into fanciful shapes as a child plays with plasticine! Mothers and Fathers be buggered! Oh, filthy, mother-dominated Earth! A Boy’s Best Friend is His Mother, indeed. Having had the boy dragged out of her belly, with loud outcries and a hell of a to-do, she devotes the rest of her life to a campaign calculated to stuff him back into stifling darkness … Mothers! What is a mother? Millie Small. And what is a father? The old man. And what is he, Charles Small? Their droppings, involuntarily egested like dung.

Now, again, Charles Small questions himself. Who is he, silly little man, to make recrimination? Solly Schwartz, born twisted, crooked, and deformed, found his own strength and made his own life. Schwartz’s parents were sick at the sight of him, and got rid of him as soon as possible, and that, perhaps, was the making of Solly Schwartz … Or was it? Charles Small cannot make up his mind. He is angry and confused. Was every repulsively deformed hunchback ironfoot, kicked out into the street or left on the steps of a Foundling Hospital, a Solly Schwartz? No. Why not?

This brings him back to contemplation of the immortal soul, the unconquerable soul, the soul a man carries with him from God—the Pure, the Intangible, the Incorruptible, that makes a man a man, and takes him out of that stinking, blood-and-watery darkness into the daylight and up to the stars.

Yes, just as there are bodies and bodies, so there are souls and souls. An object of derision, cruelly abused, out on the streets, utterly alone in the world, Solly Schwartz might have been selling matches, whining on a street corner. Instead, he was a master of men and of money … Priscilla, who had been born in the same bed as Charles, was as calm and unconquerable as her brother was tremulous and abject. She was brass. He was mud. How come? They had both come out of the same uncertain loins and the same frightened womb…. It occurs to Charles Small, as it has often occurred to him at one time or another, that he alone is to blame. If he had stood up to these hysterical bullies … if, if, if! But it wasn’t in him to do so, coward slave that he was…. Coward slave—there he was, the actor
manqué,
on Shakespeare again.

If he were half a man he should have punched the old cow Narwall right on the nose, gone off with Ivy, chucked up his job
with Solly Schwartz, and followed his destiny as he saw it—“dree’d his weird”—and to hell with everyone.

But it was to hell with Charles Small—to the Last Circle of Ice, where the traitors go—for he betrayed both Ivy and himself.

“Damme!” he shouts, and, half-falling out of bed, puts his foot in the piss-pot, where it jams, to his further discomfiture; so that for a quarter of a minute, shaking himself loose, he hobbles, clanking, just like the hunchback. Only Solly Schwartz’s
hampered
foot is firmly planted on ringing steel, while his slithers in his own vomit.

*

Solly Schwartz kept his eye on Charles, because that idea of his involving the race for the million sixpences had brought in vast revenues. It became apparent that it pays to advertise. Huge accounts came in. Solly Schwartz proved that go-getters to whom minutes were precious and a spruce appearance essential could get a quicker, cleaner shave by using a messy preparation of lanolin which he called
Suave.
It was pronounced “Swave”, and the slogan cried
“SHAVE
WITH
SUAVE!”
He could prove that a perfectly ordinary kind of liquid glue, attractively packed, somehow stuck faster than any other glue, and sent out plaster figurines of Hercules straining every muscle to tear the leg off a chair and saying:
“IT
MUST
HAVE
STUCK
WITH
STICKO!” …
that kind of thing. He was especially strong on cigarettes that could not make you cough, coffee that could not keep you awake, and patent medicines in general. He made a small fortune advertising a Universal Remedy which he called
Panacea.
It was supposed to be good for everything from catarrh to cancer. He paid a disbarred doctor to write an impressive book about it, which he gave away at cost price. Gullible
hypochondriacs
all over the world kept this book next to their Bibles at their bed-heads—it was translated into six languages.
Panacea
was popular because of its almost intolerably vile taste. A medicine that tasted as bad as all that
had
to do you good, or what was the purpose of a bad taste? Unsolicited testimonials came in by the thousands. Bed-ridden women who had lain on their backs for fifteen years wrote saying that after three doses they got up and did everything but dance the Irish jig.
Bona
fide
doctors confirmed their patients’ accounts of miraculous cures. An old man with cancer of the stomach took only one
bottle, arose, and ate a beefsteak; it was not mentioned in the advertisement that he dropped dead half an hour later, screaming like a stuck pig.
Panacea
was a sensation.

Then it crashed overnight. Solly Schwartz had decided to take full front pages in twelve consecutive issues of a famous daily paper, at fifteen hundred pounds a page. When the contract arrived, he saw that the
Daily
Special
had put their rates up to two thousand pounds a page and so he had a row with the advertising manager of the newspaper. This unscrupulous fellow went away in a huff. Two days later, on Page Two, the
Daily
Special
printed a sensational exposure of
Panacea.
A public analyst had examined it carefully and certified that the
half-crown
bottle contained nothing but a pennyworth of paraldehyde diluted with tap-water, and a trace of blue aniline dye. The stuff was, in fact, likely to prove harmful if taken regularly, and certainly could do no good. It was coloured water made to taste awful, quite simply. Invalids all over the world relapsed and perished miserably. A few people like Millie Small insisted that it did them the world of good, and kept on buying it. But in general, there was a howl of execration from London to the Antipodes and from Norway to the Black Sea, and the
manufacturer
of
Panacea
went into liquidation, and there was no more advertising account for Solly Schwartz.

Then Schwartz became mad with rage. The Press, the Press, the dirty, stinking, corrupt, mercenary Press! He would show the Press what was what. No more advertising in the
Daily
Special,
he swore. But this was a decision which might have had grave consequences, for the
Daily
Special
was at that time the most widely circulated daily newspaper in the country, and the big advertisers liked to see their products advertised in its pages. So Solly Schwartz made one of his Napoleonic resolutions, a formidably dramatic one.

The
Daily
Special
was the biggest of all the English daily papers, and its sister paper, the
Sunday
Specials,
was
also powerful. The smallest, dullest newspaper in England was the
London
Inquirer
—a most unpalatable, gloomy sheet, that circulated among clergymen, maiden ladies, church-goers, and retired officers of the Indian Army, and was stumbling and mumbling on its way to Carey Street. Solly Schwartz went to the
proprietor
and bought the
London
Inquirer
lock, stock and barrel, for £200,000. He went about it with his old frenetic energy. He
hurt the feelings of the seventy-year-old editor and the rest of the staff by giving them the sack at a minute’s notice, and then turned his predatory nose towards Fleet Street. There, satanically persuasive, he got hold of the keenest reporters, the most
sensational
feature writers, the best cartoonists, the most outrageously vituperative leader writers; and seduced them. He offered them double wages, three-year contracts, and their names in large type on the by-lines. He swore he would make them great. He offered them bonuses, unheard-of rewards. He chose for editor a young man named Tom Paradise, features editor of the
Daily
Special
—a daring little fellow, restless, impatient, itching with ambition as with prickly-heat, desirous of new and startling things, and straining at the leash.

At vast expense he had made a new type-face, something to catch the eye. He poured all that he had into the
Inquirer,
and more, for his credit was good all over England. He plastered the hoardings with glaring posters, ominously worded:

People wondered what the hell it was all about, for this kind of advertising inspired public interest then. He addressed the editor and the staff saying: “… If you’ve got to be serious, make it rough. I want love, marriage and divorce. I want crime. There’s a man under sentence in Pentonville Gaol who killed three wives for the insurance money—get his story, write it for him, pay him what he asks. Blood and thunder, offences against small boys, rape, robbery, that’s what the public wants, the
trottels
—excitement! … Politics? We haven’t got no politics—we’re independent of politics—we go for everybody. We cater to the common
trottel,
the man in the street, the grumbler, see? And specially,
specially,
for the woman in the street. Once you’ve got the woman, you’ve got the man by the balls. Pictures, ructions—d’you follow me?” … and so on in this vein.

They followed him all right. He had chosen his men well. They were men after his own heart.

The
New
Inquirer
shook the country. Mothers forbade their
daughters to read it. But they read it themselves. It was so scandalous, so sexy, so eminently suitable for reading on a Sabbath afternoon, when you were relaxed, after you and the old man had taken advantage of the kids’ absence at Sunday school to have a bit of a cuddle. Then, again, Solly Schwartz stopped at nothing in his efforts to innate the circulation. A flock of seedy salesmen went bleating from door to door all over London with Free Gift Offers. If you took out a subscription to the
New
Enquirer
for one year, you received something valuable, such as a tea set, a camera, or an illustrated dictionary. It looked like sheer benevolence; Schwartz was giving away more than he was receiving. But the circulation soared phenomenally and so, therefore, did the advertising rates. Soon, most of the other newspapers tried the same trick, but Schwartz was one jump ahead of them. He put out an unprecedented offer—Free Insurance. He got the idea from an actuary named Rappoport. It was sublime in its simplicity: you had simply to register
yourself
as a permanent subscriber to the
New
Inquirer
and you were automatically insured against accidents. The
New
Inquirer
paid quite a considerable sum for the loss of both arms and/or legs, and something worth having if you put out both your eyes. If you were lucky enough to die under the wheels of a truck, your compensation ran into thousands. So the circulation swelled and swelled, and the
Inquirer
grew so fat with advertising that eager readers had to look twice for the news, although the scabrous stuff remained conspicuous enough.