The Thousand Deaths of Mr Small (23 page)

The policeman put him down outside the tenement in which he lived, and gave him two copper pennies. Solly Schwartz heard him say: “If the Sergeant is about, the odds are he’ll never …” Then the big, iron-heeled boots clattered away in a hurry, and Solly Schwartz went upstairs. His parents were waiting for him. For once, his father was pleased to see him, and called him by endearing diminutives. They had thought that he had been run over in the fog. There was boiled chicken in soup, farfel,
matzo-balls
, and peas. They could not, of course, have been fresh peas, but they were delicious. They loaded his plate. Mr. Schwartz pulled a wing from his portion of chicken and gave it to him with a friendly smile. It was the happiest evening of Solly Schwartz’s life. The chicken wing was scrawny and tough. But in the second that it took to tear it loose and offer it in that little warm, bright kitchen bolted and barred against the cold, the wet woolly fog, and the terrors of the night—in that second there was born a glory and a dream…. For that one second Solly Schwartz was happy. But only for that one second.)

*

He paid the bill, gave the waiter sixpence, and went back to Anselmi, hugging his parcel of tin cans. He was sad and angry. “Here they are,” he said, “and I want the job done quick. Before you start, put them in warm water and get those labels off. Keep the labels, I want those labels. How soon can I get ’em?”

“I’m a liddle-a bit slack now, so two, two-three days.”

“The day after to-morrow, you mean.”

“Oright, day after to-morrow. But-a listen—I gotta open dem tins. What I do with dem peas?”

“Keep ’em, damn ’em—I hate the sight of ’em—I never want to see another pea as long as I live,” said Solly Schwartz.

When he was gone Anselmi, turning the tin can in his hands, shook his head, smiled pitifully, and said: “
Ma
tu,
che
capisci,
gobbo?
”—Which means “You, what do
you
understand,
hunchback
?” But he said it in sorrow, not with malevolence.

Abel Abelard went back to his poor little bare studio in Fitzroy Square, where he stood for a long time gazing lovingly at his immense unfinished picture of the burning of the library at Alexandria. Like Haydon, he conceived his pictures on a huge scale. If the studio had been big enough to hold it, his canvas would have been 32 by 16 feet. He picked off a fly that had got stuck in the wet paint on the tip of a Mohammedan warrior’s nose, dashed it to the floor and trampled it to death. His lady friend, his mimi, a cheerful slattern with a snub nose and tousled hair, came in and said: “Any luck, duck?”

“Well, I’ve got five shillings, and if I can turn out some labels for this tin can I can get three pounds. But now that I come to think of it, I don’t see how I can. Look at that picture! Then they talk to me about labels!”

“Abel with a label,” she said, giggling.

“Can an oak tree grow in a flower pot?”

“It’s got to start somewhere, hasn’t it, old feller?”

“Oh well. Here, you take this five shillings and go and get me a sheet of cartridge paper and an ounce of coarse-cut Cavendish. You can spend the rest on something to eat, anything you like, and we might as well have a jug of beer.”

She took the ewer from the washstand. “Poor old Abel with his poor old label,” she said, and went out. He pealed the label off the can and, angrily at first, started to rough out the design as Solly Schwartz had suggested it. Working on a few square
inches of paper, he felt like a plainsman in a cellar—he was too big for it. He saw a pea vine as something like Jack’s beanstalk. But soon, when the girl came back with the cartridge paper and he had pinned it down and got out his water colours, he became engrossed in the work. He reduced his pea to the size of a
pea-and
-a-half. He romanticised it, idealised it, shaded and
highlighted
it until it resembled a sparkling pea-green jewel. He hung up great pods of polished jade tickled to bursting point by pretty curly tendrils. By the time he came to the tomatoes, he was
beginning
to enjoy himself. He liked tomatoes, too; and the ones he painted from memory were wonderful in their flawless perfection: no one ever saw such tomatoes on a costermonger’s barrow. Jewellers put such tomatoes in velvet-lined cases and sell them for five thousand pounds apiece. As for his chicken soup, it was so rich that it might have been ready to pour into 22-carat ingots. Having gone so far he could not stop. “Perhaps he’ll take one or two more,” he said, and painted two more labels, for a tin of carrots, and a tin of plums.

“Come on, old Abel with a label,” said the girl, yawning on the divan, “I can’t stay awake much longer.”

“Don’t bother me now. If you can’t stay awake, go to sleep. I’ve got to finish the lettering.”

When Solly Schwartz saw his work he struck his iron foot in an ecstasy of admiration until it rang like an alarm bell, crying: “That’s the thing, that’s the very thing! The other two? The carrots, the plums? Certainly! How much was it I said I’d pay you? A pound apiece, was it? Right, here’s five pounds—and here’s a couple of pounds extra for a good job.”

“I don’t know,” said Abel Abelard pensively fluffing out his beard, “now that I come to look at them in cold daylight, you know, they look … Well, rather too good to be true, I’m afraid.”

“That’s the whole point, you donkey! That’s the beauty of them, don’t you see? Write me down your name and address on a bit of paper.”

Five days later, carrying a large, brand-new suitcase and dressed in sober pepper-and-salt, Solly Schwartz caught the 8.15 at Euston, bound for Slupworth in the Midlands, where W. W. Narwall lived.

P
EOPLE
who were born in Slupworth and cannot afford to go elsewhere are proud of the town which is, they boast, ever so old. Gloomy, dour, sullen farmers working in their fields outside the town have unearthed undeniable evidence of Slupworth’s antiquity. In the Museum—three glass cases in the Free Library—there are flint arrow-heads and axe-heads that date back to the Stone Age. It is indicated that Neolithic nomads, weary of wandering, gazed upon the valley of Slupworth and said, in effect: “Here is the Promised Land.” There are also some Roman remains, dug up by some busybody of a vicar who fancied himself as an archæologist; several broken pots, a broken bronze buckle, a broken spear-head, a broken sword, several handfuls of scrap metal so deeply corroded that not even the British Museum can make head or tail of them, three copper coins utterly defaced, and a bronze knob. Of this knob one expert has said one thing, and another something else. It has a shelf all to itself. Thus it is conveyed that Slupworth was good enough for the Romans, who were masters of the world. They could have wallowed in the fleshpots of Egypt, rolled on silken carpets in Syria, and made merry in ancient Rome—but they came to Slupworth. A mud slinger who said that some centurion on his way to the Wall had probably halted in the valley to get a drink of water and a bite to eat and give his men a chance to tighten their harness, throw their rubbish away, and empty their bowels before hurrying on, became a social outcast in Slupworth.

Queen Elizabeth stopped there and listened to a quarter of the mayor’s oration before she boxed his ears, called him a
tight-mouthe
d
ninny, and went on her way. Cavaliers and
Roundheads
skirmished in the valley. One of King Charles’ gentlemen, wounded in the thigh, crawled to the door of a certain Mistress Endless and begged for shelter in the name of Christian charity, because Ireton’s men were on his track. She not only took him in; she locked him in, and sent her grandson galloping
belly-to-earth
on a neighbour’s horse to fetch one of Ireton’s sergeants whose name was Hip-And-Thigh Edge, whom the Royalist fought,
hopping on one leg, until he was brought down by a musket ball. His sword and gloves, also, are in the Museum, under a card upon which the librarian has written their history, and the reason why the main road of Slupworth was called Endless Road until the Restoration, when it was renamed Royal Road.

But Slupworth did not become truly great until 1806, when a man called Horace Hodd, who had managed to secure a contract to provide hides for the government, established a great tannery by the river at the north end of the town. (The central square of Slupworth is still called Hodd Circus.) Drovers whipped in great herds of cattle; for while he was about it Hodd had undertaken to provide the Navy with salt beef—salt being available in abundance from Cheshire, not too far to the north-west. Out of the beeves came tallow, which someone else bought and turned into soap and candles in a manufactory that grew and grew. In 1825 someone discovered a seam of coal less than three miles north of the town, and a local speculator sunk a shaft. He was a lucky speculator. He found iron as well as coal. Since then, no doubt, he has found brimstone. So, up sprang a great foundry, and no one in Slupworth need want for hard work. Men, women and children went crawling down into the pit the coal-and-ironmaster had digged for himself. Hungry men and pregnant women pecked his profit out of the coal face while famished six-year-old children, yelping under the canes of the overseers, pushed the loaded trolleys. Babies were born, and died in the Slupworth pits—and begotten, too, for vile things happened in the dark. But the foundries and tanneries and candle factories thundered and rumbled and blazed, and the smoke of their burning went up to heaven … and came down again, rejected by God, to settle in soot upon the town, which grew richer and richer, and dirtier and dirtier. The magnates’ wives—one or two very wealthy men had bought young ladies out of impecunious polite society—began to withdraw, politely, from Slupworth. They didn’t mind its money but they couldn’t stand its breath. Over by Turton, a few miles up the river, where the clay was, a Lancashire man had already established a great brick kiln. Fine red brick houses were put up in walled gardens in a place called Woody Dell, half an hour’s carriage drive from the town. Hodd, the tanner, built something like the Royal Pavilion at Brighton. The soap
-and-candle-
maker, although he was not so rich as Hodd, called in an architect from London and ordered something in the Italian style,
with a moat to surround it. The coal-and-ironmaster, to everyone’s chagrin and astonishment, demonstrated himself as a modest man of simple taste: his house was a scale model of Buckingham Palace, considerably less than half size.

Slupworth has its show places. Its history is not without dramatic incident. When the invisible King Lud sent out his inaudible word there was the devil to pay in Slupworth, Hell emptied itself. The pits spewed up a legion of gaunt men, women and children, black as devils, armed with pick-axes, shovels and lighted torches. Out of the foundries came a fiendish mob of half-naked, copper-coloured, smoke-smudged men with burned hands and faces, brandishing sledge-hammers. From one of the mine shafts there came a heavy explosion, a dull red glow—as chance would have it, at that moment there was an explosion of fire-damp. The rioters marched into the town, but a man whose name is unrecorded ran in ahead of the procession and warned the authorities, saying that his wife was bad with dust in the chest, and he hoped, God forgive him, that the gentlemen would kindly remember him. The Slupworth militia was called out and broke the rioters with one brief volley of ball, killing three and wounding twelve. Then the mob, throwing down picks, hammers, tongs, and torches, ran off into the dark, hotly pursued by the militia, led by Colonel of Militia Horace Hodd on horseback. Nineteen were caught. Sixteen of these, being grown men, were described as “ringleaders”, and hanged at the next assizes. The other three, being ten-year-old boys, were sentenced to transportation for life, and packed off to Australia, where one of them died under the whip, one committed suicide, and one lived to beget children and breed sheep. His great-
great-grea
t
grandson is not above telling the tale, although he has made a million out of sheep and has a controlling interest in a
newspaper
. He boasts of his history, talking through clenched teeth, almost without moving his lips, which is the way they speak in Slupworth … not unlike old lags who can carry on intimate conversations ventriloquially under the eye of the jailer. But the Slupworthians say: “Ah, see? That’s a Slupworth lad. That lad ships tons and tons of mutton to England every week—hundreds of tons. You can keep your London. It’s Slupworth as feeds England.”

Slupworth is self-consciously working-class and belligerently conservative. Liberal-minded Slupworthians admit that the
British Museum, although it is crammed with foreign rubbish, is in its way a better museum than their own. They even admit that Bond Street in London has more shops than Royal Road; and that after sunset, in London or Paris, one may go out and have dinner in a restaurant. But in admitting this they pump a little more wind into the bloated bladder of their civic pride. They thank God that they are not the kind of folk that have to go to restaurants to eat; they thank God that home cooking is good enough for them; they thank God that the citizens of
Slupworth
do not waste money supporting dirty filthy night clubs in which fools empty their pockets and lower their constitutions with foreign wines, weaken themselves in the arms of women with dyed hair, and chuck away sixpences to cloak-room attendants. Whenever a wealthy Slupworthian, visiting the Capital on business, meets another Slupworthian with a flushed face in a night club, palpating the thigh of some apathetic blonde, he winks and makes a moue, as if to say:
It’s
all
right,
old
man,
I
understand.
You’ve
got
to
know
what
this
sort
of
thing
is,
for
the
children’s
sake,
so
that
you
can
tell
them
what
to
avoid.

Then the man with the blonde pretends to brush cigarette ash off her knee while he lifts his eyebrows, depresses the corners of his mouth, and contrives to say without words, with a twitch of his cheeks:
I
am
trying
to
reform
this
young
woman,
but
for 
good
ness
’
sake
don’t
breathe
a
word
to
the
wife.

Certain Slupworthians, after many years of toil, go abroad. In 1928 the soap-and-candle man, whose name is Dong, made a grand tour. Dong visited London, Paris, Nice, Monte Carlo, Florence, Rome, Naples, and Capri. When he returned, and fellow-Slupworthians asked him what he thought of it all, he said: “There were a lot of beggars. There were a lot of flies. They mess up the grub with sauces. You can’t understand a word they say. They go in for old-fashioned buildings. The policemen wear funny hats. Otherwise it’s nowt different from Slupworth.”

This man Dong had married the daughter of the builder and brickmaker, Calvin Lamb, and was, like W. W. Narwall, a great man in Slupworth.

There are cinemas in Slupworth now, and electric signs;
motor-buses
, dance halls, sixpenny bazaars, and automobile agencies: but still the wind seems to blow from all the thirty-two points of the compass at once; and what with a tannery, the
soap-and-candle
factory, the colliery, the foundry, and the new fertiliser
works, Slupworth still stinks under a smoky cloud that drops black snow, as it did when young Solly Schwartz came in with his great suitcase that looked heavy but felt light because it was full of empty tin cans wrapped in tissue paper.

A porter, with a face like a hangman, looking at him as though he were measuring him for the drop, cocked an eyebrow at the suitcase and, when Solly Schwartz told him to take it to a cab, exerted his strength and fell down—at which Solly Schwartz made music with his stick upon his iron foot and shouted with laughter. Then he gave the man two shillings to buy balm for his hurt feelings, and asked: “What’s the best hotel here?”

“Well, that depends on what yow mean by best.”

“Where do the best people go, you
trottel?
”

“That depends on what yow calls best,” said the porter.

“I see. All right. Then tell me this: what’s the most expensive hotel?”

“The Queen Elizabeth.”

“Put that bag in a cab and tell him to go to the Queen Elizabeth.”

The porter said, querulously: “There’s nothing in it. It’s light.”

“I’m sorry. Next time I come here I’ll fill it up with lead. Take it to a cab.”

“Gentleman from London wants yow to take ’im and the luggage to Queen Elizabeth,” said the porter to the driver of a four-wheeler who crouched on his seat and shivered in the mist.

“Elizabeth? Cost you half-crown.”

“Get on with the job,” said Solly Schwartz, climbing into the cab.

The cabbie flapped the reins, beat his horse out of the apathy of its misery, and the cab rumbled over the cobblestones. It stopped a hundred yards from the station. “What are you waiting for?” asked Solly Schwartz.

“Yow wanted the Queen Elizabeth, and ’ere yow are,” said the driver.

“What! Do you think you’re going to charge me half a crown for half a minute’s ride, you thief?”

“Oi said half a crown and yow said——”

“—Shut your mouth and stop yow-ing! You and your yow! Half a crown for that? I’ll see you in hell first,” said Solly Schwartz, gripping his suitcase. “Here you are, yow-yow—take a
shilling and think yourself lucky … and stop shaking your fist at me, or I’ll break your arm. I’ve got
your
number, cabbie. Go about your business.”

Thoroughly quelled, the cabman drove away. His hungry old horse with its hunched shoulders, sway-back, and lowered head reminded him of his passenger; so, having a whip in his hand, he gave it a terrible thrashing. Sweetlips, the horse, took it patiently: the gelder’s knife, the breaker’s lash, the cold iron bit; the harness, the blinkers, the heavy shafts, the iron-shod hooves, the toil, the wind and the rain, and the whip … that was life. At the end of it all, peace: a little oats, a little hay, and, after the delicious relief of the unbuckled harness, a little sleep. Man was God; God was good.

Meanwhile, having established himself in the best hotel’s best room, Solly Schwartz was eating steak pie and insinuating himself into the confidence of the waiter.

“Stranger here, sir?”

“I’ve never been here before, but one of my best friends comes from Slupworth, a man called Lumpitt. I don’t know if you know him. He used to have a shop in the Royal Road.”

“What, Lumpitt? We all knew Lumpitt’s. It’s Provincial Stores now, though. They say he went up to London.”

“That’s right, that’s where I met him. We’re the best of friends. According to what I hear,” said Solly Schwartz, lowering his voice, “he was, as you might say, pushed out of it here by … what’s his name? …”

“Narwall, you mean. Is that it?”

“A bad ’un, by all accounts.”

“It’s not for me to say, sir.”

“A sort of a catch-’em-alive-o, or so I’ve heard.”

“I don’t know about that, sir,” said the waiter uneasily.

“You can’t help admiring the man, though, can you, eh?”

“Yow’re right there. Started with nothing and now … why, I dare say Narwall could put his hands on half a million pounds.”

“You don’t mean to say! Put his hands on half a million pounds?”

“Ah. Put his hands on half a million pounds—and keep ’em there.”

“Would you believe it! My good old friend Lumpitt told me he started small.”