The Thousand Deaths of Mr Small (37 page)

Then Charles Small was put to bed. The old man came back
with a pound of rump steak, bellowing: “Quick, Millie! Underdo it for the little beggar, the butcher told me—it makes up for the loss from bloody bled—bleddy blood—blood, schmud, mud!—Underdo it, don’t overdo it!”

While the pots and pans were clattering in the kitchen
downstairs
, the old man sat on the edge of his son’s bed, and, being proud of the boy, gave him a dusty peppermint tablet out of his waistcoat pocket. Charles Small remembers that, on the whole, he enjoyed this affair. The old man gingerly picked up the Boswell, opened it at random, and read a few words. He grumbled a little under his breath, and muttered: “‘Yes sir’ … ‘no sir’ … sir, schmir! That’s what they teach them already! Take a lesson. Sis the bourgeoisie. No sirs, schmirs! If I was an American as I am a bleddy Englishman … goodness knows what!” Stroking his sleeves contemplatively, he concluded: “Boychik, take it from me: never will I lay down these arms—to the bones I’d work them for you!”

Then Millie Small came up with a pound of fried steak on a platter, which the boy Charles attacked with something like ecstasy, while the old man, nodding and smiling, brushing up his moustache, his eyes moist with pride, stammered: “Eat it all up! … It, it, it makes blood … I mean bled … I mean …” Confused, he shouted: “I haven’t had your bleddy education.”

Millie took Boswell’s
Life
of
Johnson
downstairs, and, dressing herself in her best, rushed out to show it to Lily, the wife of Nathan, the Photographer.

Thus, Charles Small became acquainted with the Drama.

*

After this there was no stopping him. The old man nearly jumped out of his skin one afternoon when he came into the sitting-room and found Charles Small horribly hunch-backed, with a cushion stuffed under his jacket, his face distorted, clawing at his reflection in a mirror, and declaiming lines by Shakespeare out of the mouth of Richard Crookback. I. Small was frightened. It seemed to him that the boy had gone mad.

He groped for something heavy, because it seemed to him that the child might bite him. But when Charles turned and confronted him, still scratching the air with curved fingers and leering
disgustingly
—carried away by his rôle—all the old man could say was: “Shhh!”

“Shakespeare!” cried Charles Small. “King Richard!”

Charles dragged the cushion from under his jacket and resumed his natural form, while his features composed themselves.

Poking at the cushion with his left hand, while, feeling his son’s spine with his right, I. Small sighed and said: “Ah, ah,
Shakespeare
. Sis different.” Then, stroking the boy’s shoulder, he said: “Khatzkele, I want you should always make with
Shakespeare
, do you hear? A Yiddisher boy should stick miv his own people—no bourgeois! …
Na!
—take already the cushion. Sis Shakespeare. But put it back. And don’t twist your face like that—liddle boys what twist up their faces, they stay like that.”

Charles Small stuffed the cushion back under his coat and made such faces at himself that he could not sleep for several nights for dreaming of himself; while the old man went
downstairs
to the kitchen and said to Mrs. Small: “He’ll turn out to be an actor, yet!”—grinning like an imbecile

Millie Small (trust her to spoil everything) said: “An actor. That’s all we are short of, an actor!”

*

Yet Charles Small really did turn out to be an actor
manqué.
He knows that he still is a player who has missed the bus as he lies there putting on the devil of an act with his belly-ache, which is not acute, and his nerves, which are no more snarled and tangled than the line on a fisherman’s carelessly-cast reel that an hour of patient concentration will disentangle and make slick and smooth again. Actor
manqué
—actor
râté!
Monkey, rat!

A year after he won the Reading Prize with bis “nevah,
nevah
,
NEVAH
” (The old man, loaded with bloody towels, his moustache anti-clockwise, warned him at the top of his voice never to shout again, brandishing a chamber-pot: “—or over goes this bleddy chamber on the wrong side of your head.” Of course, the contents of the china vessel into which Charles Small had bled from the nose, and micturated, poured over I. Small’s head and also up his sleeve, so that there were ructions in the house. Flapping about with his sodden collar and trying to wring out his
soaking sleeve at the same time, the old man howled: “No more never! There’s no such bleddy word! Never no more never! If I were a bleddy American as I am a bleddy Englishman, over would go this pot on the wrong side of your head! I never would lay down my bleddy arms! … No more never, or you’ll get something, bleddy little beggar!”)—a year later, there was a Speech Day and School Concert. Suddenly, prematurely, Charles Small’s voice broke, so that he spoke with grotesque intonations. He sounded like a fantasia for the wood-winds and strings: now, he was a bassoon; half a second later, he was a flute; and then, blushing like a letter-box, took over the oboe and got in a few pure notes before something went pizzicato in his larynx and precipitated him into the tuneless depths of the double-bass … out of which he struggled, making a noise like a tin whistle. This was very embarrassing to Charles Small. To make matters worse, hair began to grow on his legs, so that, since he wore short knickers, he was ashamed. He begged abjectly for trousers—at which Millie Small was so overcome that she got to the lavatory in what might be described as a photo-finish and the old man struck him on the wrist with a buttered muffin, and punished him by taking away his silver watch and chain, saying: “You have nothing but your chains to bleddy-well lose! No trousers,
schnip!
” (He returned the watch and chain three minutes later, thunderously scowling and growling: “Let it be a lesson! Trousers, schmousers!”)

So the boy became shyly silent. At one gathering of the family he was coaxed into a recitation. “No bleddy death!” I. Small warned him, letting off steam in a terrible blast through the safety valve under his moustache, so that drops of tea flew all over the place. “No death, or I’ll kill you!”

Now the last poem Charles Small had been compelled to learn in school was Grey’s
Elegy
in
a
Country
Churchyard.
He recited it with actions again, in a voice something like that of Feodor Chaliapin, but raucous. It set everyone’s nerves on edge—it vibrated in the ears. He thought that he was going pretty well, until he came to the verse:

Then one of the sisters, who was pregnant, folded her arms over bloated mammary glands, and said: “Bust! Bust! That’s the language they pick up in school!”

I. Small, purple with humiliation, threatened him with a thin slice of bread and butter, snorting like a grampus: “He’s here again, with his bleddy death, the hooligan!” Charles Small was not put out by this: bat one thing seriously perturbed him—he had begun beautifully in a fine bass-baritone, slipped by easy stages up and down the range of a cello, and ended on the shrill note of a fife.

He had disgraced himself again. After that he became sardonic, taciturn—he was afraid to open his mouth. But—here was one of the cock-eyed idiosyncracies of his larynx—when it came to singing he could keep his voice stable. When he sang it sounded like some fantastic cross between a kettle-drum and a horn. Consequently he was chosen for a leading part in an act out of
The
Pirates
of
Penzance
in the Prize Day Concert. He led the policemen, singing:

The applause was deafening. I. Small bounced on his seat, pounding the floor with his stick, his face wet with joy and pride. Millie, who was as happy as he, looked sour—she would never give him the satisfaction of sharing his delights—and said, ominously: “Hm! So that’s what they are. Jumping on his mother, eh? As long as we know!”

“So what you want I should bleddy do?” asked I. Small in his piercing whisper. “Split his bleddy head open? Sis Shakespeare! Listen to the bleddy clapping.”

Indeed, Charles Small took a curtain call, and a visiting Lord, who had been prevailed upon to preside over the prize-giving, shook him warmly by the hand. He also shook the hands of Mr. and Mrs. Small and told them that they had “a promising young
fellow.” Mrs. Small got to the lavatory one jump ahead of another proud mother—her son had been Chief of the Pirates—who could not contain her urine.

Millie Small scuttled back just in time to see the Lord and his Lady pausing by Charles Small and the old man. Millie could have sunk into the ground with embarrassment; for her husband, bent on doing the right thing, dragged out of his breast pocket a silver cigar-case not much smaller than a two-pound biscuit tin and said: “A cigar, Your Majesty?” This immense case contained one twopenny cigar, somewhat frayed. The Lord took it with a gracious expression of gratitude, and said to his Lady: “Give the child a sweet, my dear.”

The Lady rummaged in her silver-mesh bag and found a
black-currant
throat pastille, brushed some loose rice powder from the surface of it, and popped it into Charles’s mouth. He was so overwhelmed, and the pastille so nauseating, that he swallowed it whole. Then the Lord and the Lady passed on. I. Small had some crack-brained idea of rushing after them and inviting them to Appenrodt’s, but his wife stopped him by pinching him in the arm so savagely that he squeaked, and started to say: “Bled——”. But then he remembered where he was, and whispered: “—dy beggary!” Charles Small stood, still dressed like a policeman, gulping and gulping back what threatened to be a regurgitation of expensive perfume. He looked to the left and to the right: he was hemmed in. He feared that he might not be able to make the dash for the place in time, and started to edge his way into the crowded aisle, but the old man, wet-eyed, grabbed him by the collar, saying, almost insanely incoherent: “Khatzkele! Boychik! … You see what is! Is Shakespeare! … Honour thy bleddy mother! … Shakespeare! … His proper name was Shocket. I was told! Stand by your own people, boychik, and you get education under the English flag!”

Charles Small’s collar was an Eton collar, and the old man’s affectionate grip and emphatic jolting constricted the boy’s throat. He managed to say: “His name wasn’t Shocket—it was Bacon.”

He heard his mother say, vigorously nodding: “Hm! So that’s what he is. Bacon. Nice language for a Jewish person!”

Then, overcome by emotion and poisoned by the pastille—
Erhook!
—
Bouah!
—Charles Small threw up a little glutinous lump of medicated confectionery, which bounced off the
Headmaster’s
waistcoat. He had nothing more inside him to
regurgitate
, having been too preoccupied with his art to eat since
supper-time
the night before. Surreptitiously, Millie Small picked up the pastille and wrapped it in a handkerchief, to show her sisters that her son was by way of becoming a pet of the Nobility and Gentry. The Headmaster shook I. Small warmly by the hand, saying: “The Theatre is your son’s bench.”

The old man, for this occasion, had gone to a barber and had his moustache drastically trimmed and fixed in the Guardee style—rolled upwards with fine curling-tongs into two neat cylinders. His emotion, now, was such that the cylinders of hair uncurled and, moistened with perspiration, hung down so that he looked like an excitable baby walrus. But he did not care. The Smalls were the last out of the hall. In the vestibule the old man stopped, frozen in his tracks, staring at something on the floor. It was the cigar he had given to the Lord. Now this hurt his feelings and tied his tongue so that he said: “Begging bleddary! Chains I should have to lose!” But at that moment a crowd of boys made a circle around Charles Small, singing “For he’s a jolly good fellow! …”—and everybody was happy.

This, as they said later, was the “ruination” of Charles Small.

Y
ES
, after this, Charles Small remembers his lust for
self-exhibition
became unbridled. Wherever there was a mirror, there was Charles Small, mowing and gibbering at himself, almost biting himself. Once, playing Hotspur, and shouting:

—he knocked over a vase and cracked the overmantel mirror, incurring the wrath of I. Small, who had been spellbound up to that point. The old man didn’t mind the loss of the vase—it was a present from Lily, the wife of Nathan, the Photographer, inscribed
A
Present
from
Margate
—but he took exception to “bloody noses”.

He shouted: “What kind of bleddy talk is this, ‘bloody noses’? Already he’s starting to bleddy-well bloody, the hooligan!”

“But it’s in the book, Dad—look—that’s the way Shakespeare wrote it. See?”

I. Small scrutinised the passage and, somewhat mollified, said: “Shakespeare, yes. But no bleddy-well bloodying by you. You’re not Shakespeare … and what’s a Mammet?”

Charles Small had not been informed that mammets were the lactatory appendages vulgarly known as Tits. But the old man, somehow, was intrigued by the word. Possibly it reminded him—that mother-haunted slob—of “mama”. Mammet! The very sound was like a bell. The word worked its way into his system, like Bleddy—he could not get rid of it. It hooked itself to his vocabulary like a burr when, after a quarrel with the
milkman
, he called the man a bleddy mammet—when he was out of ear-shot. After that it was Mammet this, and Mammet that…. “What do they take me for, what? A bleddy mammet?” … “Don’t worry me, Charley—go play with mammets” … and so forth.

Meanwhile Mr. and Mrs. Small encouraged their boy to recite in public. On one occasion, when the family gathered to shed crocodile tears over the corpse of a cousin three times removed—a poor relation; he could not be removed too many times or too far—Charles was called upon to recite a piece of solemn poetry. He did so with gusto. A relation, even more distant (she wore a wig; they wished her beyond the horizon; she was not elegant enough for them) came and kissed him and said, with tears in her eyes: “Bless him! All my life I should have such a funeral, God forbid!”

The boy became stage-struck. He entertained the family in the evenings with masterful Shakespearean characterisations. He stuffed a cushion between his shoulders, playing King Richard; he put on one of Millie’s petticoats, glued to his chin a handful of horsehair torn from the sofa, and played Macbeth. (There was the devil to pay about that—the stuff wouldn’t come off.) He smeared his face with a paste of flour and water, smothered it with cotton wool, shoved a great pillow under his jersey and did a Falstaff which, as Nathan, the Photographer, said was as good as Beerbohm Tree. But in this rôle he offended Millie Small, in the soliloquy on the battlefield, when Falstaff speaks of Honour:

Mrs. Small blushed. She was not used to such language, and shut him up pretty quick. I. Small, in his hurricane-whisper, said: “Millie, for goodness sake, don’t be a mammet—sis Shakespeare!”

“I don’t like that kind of talk. You’re not in Cracow now,” said Millie Small.

So Charles Small blackened himself with soot, wrapped himself in a coconut doormat with
Welcome
stamped on it and played Caliban:

With this, I. Small was content. “Riches to drop upon me,” he said, “but what for the bleddy doormat? What for the dirty face?”

Charles Small was developing an artistic temperament. He shrugged his way out of the room, replaced the doormat, and went to his bedroom, a misunderstood genius. Then he realised that he was hungry. But his artist’s pride held him in thrall. He consoled himself with the plays of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, rehearsing the rôle of Sir Lucius O’Trigger. Carried away, making war-like gestures, he boomed: “
Od’s
balls
and
barrels!
”—just as the old man crept into the room with some fish on a plate.

For once, I. Small did not drop the plate. He stepped
backwards
in alarm and nearly fell over the banisters; but came back with the fish, saying: “Eat it up, boychik.”

He left the fish and fried potatoes, and rolls and butter, and a glass of milk, on the chest-of-drawers, with a parting benediction: “Sleep well, boychik; so long you shouldn’t grow up to be a mammet.”

Charles Small, the histrionic prodigy with soot in his ears, scornfully ate his supper to the last crumb, always misunderstood.

He knows now that his mother sent up the food; that the old man insisted on carrying it; and—this at the back of his mind—poor I. Small was tremendously moved by the line about “crying to dream again”.

Charles Small wriggles. The isle is full of noises—it is a pandemonium. He has not the least relish for what the heavens are going to drop upon him. The sounds give no delight, and hurt like the devil. He doesn’t want any more dreams—he will settle for plain black sleep.

Sleep. He may whistle for it. It won’t come. Memory bounces back like the ping-pong ball. Why, oh why for the love of God won’t it take the last cool dive into the deep dark hole and be over and done?

*

Weak
as
a
rat,
weak
as
a
rat,
weak
as
a
rat!
thinks Charles Small, ineffectually snapping his teeth at the empty air in the
jaws of the terrier, Time—Time, that is shaking him as a terrier shakes a rat, before throwing his limp corpse over the right shoulder into the dust behind.

He would die before he admitted the fact to anyone but a sympathetic stranger, but they were right—in the Drama lay his ruin; or at least, the seeds of his ruin.

Few men had ever been cursed as Charles Small curses himself now, while he rolls and writhes in one of his “Moods”, biting the pillow in self-torment. Trust him! He achieves, in the anguish of his impotence, something which he could never accomplish by considered endeavour—he bites right through the pillow, and, coughing, blows out into the room a quantity of chicken feathers, some of which fly into his nostrils and make him sneeze.
Thereupon
—I. Small to the life!—he takes it out on the pillow, gives it a thorough beating with a feeble fist—and is suffocated with feathers again. The air is full of the pluckings from the
hindquarters
of clucking fowl. Charles Small cannot get away from them. The feathers are in his eyes, his ears, his hair, his nostrils. He pokes his head out of the window into the open air, but there he finds no relief. He is being tickled all over; sneezing, hawking, scratching, weeping. Fluff and snot, tears and feathers,
self-imposed
irritation …
c’est
la
vie,
c’est
la
bleddy
vie.

The front door slams. Hettie has sent the brats (he nearly called them “bleddy beggars”) to see Humphrey-Bleddy-Bogart—he means Humphrey-Bloody-Bogart—and much good it may do them!

He knows that that sloppy, tear-soaked poultice of a wife is loitering about downstairs, probably preparing a milk-pudding; waiting and hoping. The thought fills him with rage. She is quieter than a mouse, but, on the spur of the moment Charles Small tears open the bedroom door and yells: “Can’t a man rest? Hold that bloody noise, will you?”

(As God is his judge, he said “bleddy”.)

Hettie comes running, whimpering: “Charley, what’s the matter? What did I do?”

“Matter!” (He nearly said
Matter,
schmatter
.) “Why didn’t you go to the pictures with the kids?”

Hettie says: “But, Charley darling, I can’t leave you like this.”

Now Charles Small, coughing up feathers, screams: “Go, for God’s sake!”

“Yes, Charley,” says Hettie, and goes. Then Charles Small’s heart is so full of grief and guilt that unshed tears flush out his acidulous stomach and, for a few minutes, he feels like a human being again.

He opens the bedroom door, crying: “Hey, Hettie! Wait a minute, we’ll go together!” He would quite like to see Humphrey Bogart; only, somehow, he could not give Hettie the satisfaction. “Oh Hettie!” he calls, shambling in stockinged feet into the dining-room. Only an echo answers. Upon the expensive mahogany dining-room table stands a covered dish of delicious chicken, all ready for him, with trimmings. But no Hettie. He picks the chicken up by one leg and makes as if to dash it into the Tudor fireplace; thinks better of it; puts it back on the dish and re-covers it. (Now why does this strike so strangely familiar a note in his mind?)

Just out of spite he will not eat a thing, although all of a sudden he is hungry. He will die of starvation before he eats that woman’s chicken—her and her Humphrey Bogart! Well, perhaps one wing … No! His will is iron! He goes to the refrigerator in the kitchen and makes himself an inch-thick sandwich of cold beef (cunningly disguising the cut) and pads back to the bedroom, gulping like a wolf. When Hettie comes home and sees the chicken untouched, she will be worried. “Just give me a glass of water,” he will say in a feeble voice. That will teach her. Let her have her Humphrey Bogart….

He wants his Ivy.

*

Now, Charles Small has such a paroxysm of rage that he bounces upon the bed until the springs groan and the woodwork makes a noise like the trapped mouse that he knows himself to be. Gulping back a mouthful of liquid that feels like the stuff they use to clean stained water-closets, and sitting up to facilitate its passage back to where it belongs—in his unhygienic crap-house of a heart—he is burned up with a great sour hate. This hate is different from the hates that have come and gone before. It is a slow, itchy, smouldering hate that oozes out of him in horrid yellow drops, and pollutes that which is most sacred and secret.

Now he starts to hate Solly Schwartz, whom, in his self-pity, he begins to think of as his evil genius. Flash little hunchback! In his mind’s eye Charles Small sees Schwartz over the sights of a
shotgun. He has never handled a shotgun, but remembers having seen one in the window of a shop near Charing Cross Hospital—a tremendous thing designed to be screwed with a swivel to a punt, for the butchery of ducks. He dreamed, then, of beautiful bitter mornings in the Norfolk marshes … dawn rises, day breaks, and over come the big grey wild ducks in V-formation.
Bang!
goes the duck-gun, and—ploppety-plop—down comes the whole bloody lot. (The old man was looking with yearning at a brass blunderbuss: then a taxicab back-fired, and the two dreamers jumped out of their skins.) That was when, having slipped on a banana skin, Charles Small was taken to Charing Cross with a sprained wrist.

A sprain—oi!—a
sprain!
On the whole, he enjoyed it. The bandages made him feel important. He exaggerated the pain, which, when his wrist was tied up, was inconsiderable. But he made the most of it, of course; he cashed in on it. He had already developed quite a histrionic knack. The old man and the old woman were almost out of their minds with worry—they were always almost out of their minds with worry—and, to comfort him, took him to Mme. Tussaud’s Waxworks Show in the Marylebone Road, where I. Small, having made a laughing-stock of himself, asking questions of a wax policeman, and saying “Hoxcuse me” when he passed a wax doorman, became erudite. In Mme. Tussaud’s I. Small positively spouted information. He pointed out the image of Henry VIII, saying: “Khatzkele, Charley, boychik, take a lesson! He married nine hundred wives, so they chopped his head off.” Looking up at the model of the Russian Giant, he said: “See? He ate up all his cebbage!” Mrs. Small, who—God knows why—was gazing fondly at a waxen image of Mr. Gladstone, rejoined them at a moment when I. Small became silent, gazing at a representation of Alexander Pope. The hunchbacked poet, his head wrapped in a kind of turban, glared angrily into space.

“He’s here again with his humps,” said Millie Small.

Coming out of a reverie, I. Small said: “Humpbacks,
schmump-backs
! A Yid is a Yid!”

Millie Small said: “Shhh! You’re not in Cracow now. No more humpy angels—let’s go to the Chamber of Horrors.”