The Thousand Deaths of Mr Small (39 page)

“A trade, a trade!” screamed I. Small.

Giving Charles gooseberry pie, to which he was exceptionally partial, his mother said, with one of her rare caresses: “You’ve got to have a trade, Charley. What trade? Tell us?”

Charles Small, tearful and humiliated, brought the house
down. Drawing himself up proudly, he said: “I am going to be an actor!”

*

Then (to paraphrase the humpbacked Mr. Pope in the manner of Silas Wegg), then flashed the living lightning from I. Small’s eyes, while screams of terror rent the affrighted skies. As for Mrs. Small: no louder shrieks to pitying Heaven are cast when husbands—God forbid—or lap-dogs breathe their last.

Thinking of hunchbacks and mock-heroics, it is inevitable that Charles Small should hark back to that earth-shaking moment when Belinda lost her lock of hair. “No louder shrieks …”

Mrs. Small was a perfect treat, and she tore out with her own hand a small lock of her own hair, and threw it at her husband, crying: “You see? What did I tell you?”

The lock—twelve or fifteen hairs—clung to I. Small’s
moustache
, so that all of a sudden he had two moustaches, one going up and the other going down. He had to pick it away before he could speak and then, his nostrils having been tickled, he sneezed one of his famous sneezes: “
Ah, Russia!—Ah, Tooshka!—Ah,
Rash-Ho!
”—and made a noise like a bull seal as he used his
handkerchief
—which later he opened, as was his habit, and carefully consulted. What with the honking, barking, and bellowing of the old man, and the screaming of the good lady, the Smalls’ house must have sounded like Pribilov Island in the mating season, when men go out armed with clubs to knock frustrated holluschickies on the head. (Charles Small, who is well read in the romantic literature of daring endeavour, and has a sneaking nostalgia for the Great White Silences, wishes to God that some hairy-arsed sealer had knocked the pair of them on the head before he was born or thought of.)

It was Charles Small, however, who was knocked on the head, with the fourth edition of the
Star
—the one that had the racing results; for I. Small, influenced by Lizzard, the atheistic cobbler, had taken to playing the horses—sixpence each way, a shilling to win, even sixpenny Doubles, Cross-Doubles, Up-and-Down: God knows what, for I. Small did not. The silly old sod pinned his faith in Lizzard—his belief was in the Unbeliever. He always lost, poor fool, as much as three-and-sixpence a week; but to see him poring over the fourth
Star,
a visitor from a foreign country might have said: “I saw the Distinguished Professor Small. His
great brow was wrinkled as his keen but weary eyes scrutinised a closely printed sheet. Between the forefinger and thumb of his right hand he held a pin. As I watched, he closed his eyes, described a circle with a pin, and drove it down, puncturing the paper, exclaiming: ‘Bleddy beggary! Mayflower, Newmarket, 130!’ Obviously this man is a genius, and should be invited to make a lecture tour.”

This is a digression. The old man struck Charles Small with such violence that he bent the evening newspaper over the boy’s head, trumpeting: “Actor, schmactor! I’ll actor you!
Na!
—Take that!” The leading article broke on Charles Small’s skull. “I’ll knock it out of him!” he said, as an aside, belabouring the boy with an advertisement for Coal Tar Soap. “I’ll break every bleddy bone in his bleddy body, the beggar!”

He stopped, at last, breathless, brandishing the stump of the little newspaper, his moustache anti-clockwise, as it generally was in such circumstances. Catching his breath, he said: “
Now
do you want to be an actor?”

Calm and pale, covered with bits of news-print, Charles Small said: “Yes!” He felt something like Coriolanus

This was the last straw. Dashing down his little bit of
newspaper
, I. Small went into the hall (as they called the passage) and came back with an immense oaken cudgel, which he grasped by the ferrule and held high, baring his teeth—the primeval I. Small, red-eyed, murderous—saying: “An actor, yes or no, or over goes this stick on the wrong side of your bleddy head!”

Millie Small, terrified, shrieked: “Srul, Srul, not on the head! On the bottom, not on the head!”

“Bottom, schmottom—yes or no—quick!”

Charles Small remembers that, thinking of Coriolanus, he drew himself up proudly, and said: “I want to be an actor”—and waited for the club to fall, knowing perfectly well that it never would fall. It didn’t. The old man lowered the great stick which, properly wielded, might have knocked down a bullock (Charles remembers seeing him run like a maniac when a heifer mooed in a meadow, leaving his wife and children behind him) and said, portentously: “So! All right! You wait! You’ll see!”

Then he grounded his stick imperiously, but—as if you didn’t know!—imperiously drove the ferrule into his own instep. Then, by the Lord, there was the devil to pay. Blinding and beggaring blasting and bleddying, making like Job covered with boils and
God out of the Whirlwind all in one—with a certain flavour of Jeremiah and Habakkuk—violent and incomprehensible as the Book of Revelations—I. Small went off the deep end. He cast his shoe over Edom; at least he kicked himself. He smote the Amalekites; he beat his breast and smacked himself in the face. He wiped out the Amorites, and slew Og, king of Bashan. He punched himself on the nose. If he had been a contortionist he would have kicked himself in the stomach. And all the time he hopped, caressing his injured foot. He hurled the great oak stick away; and even that did no harm: it rebounded from a stuffed sofa and fell to the carpeted floor.

Charles Small, with the scornful smile he had so often rehearsed—when he was not busy picking at his pimples—stood like a rock … well, if not exactly a rock, a well-set jelly … until the old man, quite exhausted, sat down on the first available piece of furniture. This happened to be a coal scuttle, an
aristocratic
coal scuttle of oak with plenty of brass on it. On top of this coal scuttle there was a brass knob shaped like an acorn. As luck would have it—trust the old man!—when he threw himself down with all his weight, something untoward happened. If you paid him for it, he could never have managed it in a hundred years. But on this night of all nights, by some trick of chance, the brass acorn went through his trousers and into his anus.

Little Priscilla, who had witnessed the entire scene, danced happily around the room, crying: “More again, Daddy! More again!”

“Go to bed,” said Mrs. Small. “Srul, don’t make a fool of yourself, get up!”

In a whisper that sounded like a buzz-saw going through knotty wood, I. Small said: “Send the bleddy beggars to bed. A nice thing!” Then he bellowed: “To bed! To bleddy bed! Quick! By my life and yours, too, Millie!”

Coriolanus, with folded arms, scornfully looking down his nose at the rabble, said:

At this, despite his agony, I. Small started to get up, but the
lid of the coal scuttle came with him so that he sat down again with a shrill cry of pain. Charles (the noblest Roman of them all) strode out, draped in his imaginary toga. The ludicrous I. Small sat helplessly gesticulating while Millie Small got Priscilla out of the room. Priscilla was a difficult child, and a perspicacious one. (Most of the difficultness of children has its roots in
precocious
perspicacity.) Priscilla wanted to see the show right through to the Curtain. Millie Small got her to bed at last. When she was neatly tucked in she said, clearly and with
resolution
: “I am going to be an actress too, Mummy.”

“Don’t be a naughty girl, or I’ll give you such a smacking! Only wicked women are actresses.”

“I don’t care,” said Priscilla.

“You dare say that again!”

“I don’t care. I’m going to be an actress.”

Mrs. Small slapped her, slapped her with all her might. When she was exhausted, and had to pause for breath, Priscilla, who had swallowed her tears, said with tremendous vigour—as if punishment had strengthened her determination: “I don’t care, don’t care, don’t care! Going to be an actress! So there!”

“I’ll kill you,” said Millie Small.

“Don’t care!”

Millie Small was defeated. What was there to do? Take a hatchet and kill the child? She raised a threatening finger and said: “You wait!”—turned out the light, slammed the door, and went downstairs. Her right hand tingled. The child was hard as iron.

In the sitting-room, I. Small, making noises like a stuck pig, was anointing himself with Vaseline. For the nonce Millie was sorry for him. “Risk your life for them, kill yourself for them, and that’s what you get for it,” she said, and gave the old man a powerful infusion of senna pods; carefully polished the knob on top of the coal scuttle, and went to bed. It had been a heavy day.

*

Now, indeed, I. Small was in trouble. He could not sit down, he could not stand up, he could not lie down—the only
comfortable
posture was kneeling, especially after Millie anointed his fundament with a burning ointment which (as it later transpired) had been given to her by some tea-drinking crony whose husband ran a livery stable. It was all a mistake—I. Small was smeared
with some stuff used by horse-chaunters to patch up scabs on the insensitive hides of old cab-horses.

The state of affairs became intolerable. He had to eat his meals on his knees, leaning over two chairs. At last, discomfort proving stronger than shame, he went to a local doctor—some
cantankerous
old failure who regarded the stethoscope as a new-fangled doodah—a doctor highly regarded in the locality because he had an evil temper and bad manners. I. Small consulted this doctor upon the advice of Lizzard, the atheistic cobbler, who said: “You go to Dr. Ribbon. That man’s no hypocrite. A few years ago, cutting a bit of leather, I gashed my thigh to the bone. Quick as lightning I get a wax-end and needle, and stitch it up. Then I go to Dr. Ribbon and I say: ‘Dr. Ribbon, what’ll I do now?’ and Dr. Ribbon says: ‘Go to hell, that will be three-
and-six
.’ There’s a man what’s lost his chains. You go to Dr. Ribbon!”

So I. Small, walking at an odd angle, went to Dr. Ribbon. He could not sit on the grubby sofa in the dingy green
waiting-room
, so he stood, leaning on his stick, looking so sad and so noble that a woman whose womb had fallen out but who
patronised
Dr. Ribbon because he insulted her, whispered to a
neighbour
with scabies: “There’s a proper gentleman.”

The womb and the scabies having been more or less kicked out of the surgery, a frightful voice cried: “Next!” and I. Small limped into the presence of a disappointed-looking man with bloodshot eyes and a purple face reticulated with burst
capillaries
and studded with warts. He was about seventy-five years old. His black morning coat was glossy with grease and grey with ashes. He wore an artificial shirt-front of celluloid, which had broken loose from its mooring, so that I. Small could see some square inches of grey flannel shirt. The surgery stank of
chloroform
and alcohol. I. Small was profoundly impressed. This was the way to live—do what you like, treat people like dogs.

“Well? What’s the matter with you?” asked Dr. Ribbon.

I. Small did not know quite how to speak to such a man. He said: “My—hoxcuse me—bottom.”

This caused the doctor to fly into a rage. “Bottom? Bottom? I asked you what’s the matter with you! Your bottom’s not the matter with you. What’s the matter with your bottom? Drop your trousers and look sharp about it!”

I. Small did so, and a fine figure he must have cut, lifting the skirts of his coat and the tail of his shirt with his left hand while
he covered his puny nakedness with his right, with his trousers about his ankles. Dr. Ribbon poked at him with a grimy
forefinger
and then, rolling a cigarette, said: “Apply Vaseline. You have a simple abrasion of the anus. Button up your trousers. Three-and-sixpence. Good day to you.”

Pale as ashes, I. Small put down a half-crown and a shilling, and said, in a tremulous voice: “
Gevalt!
”

On the way home he had to fortify himself with
sixpenny-worth
of brandy, because this diagnosis had shaken him. When he reached home Millie, who had been worrying herself sick, greeted him with wild cries. “Srul! What did the doctor say?”

Smiling bravely in his pain I. Small patted her shoulder and said: “I don’t want I should have the pleasure of bringing bad news, Millie, but you got to grin and bear it. I got Anus.”

Four days later he went back to Dr. Ribbon, because this affair was preying on his mind. “Well, what is it now?” asked the Doctor.

“Please. This, this, disease, this Anus—sis catching?”

“Your anus is your arse-hole, you fool. Three-and-sixpence. Go away.”

I. Small went home, dejected. When Millie asked him what the doctor had said, he waved her away and replied: “Don’t ask!”

He was thoroughly wretched. Maya, Illusion! He had been led to believe that he had an Anus, and it had turned out to be an arse-hole, such as one might find in any Tom Dick or Harry.

*

About this time Priscilla developed an interest in tadpoles. Goodness knows how she caught them, but she came home one afternoon with a jam-jar full of water in which swam five little black things shaped like commas. (Charles Small believes that she wheedled those tadpoles out of a bewildered boy.) The old man looked at these creatures with horror. “What new madness is this, already?” he asked.