The Thousand Deaths of Mr Small (4 page)

Charles Small punches the pillow.

If he lives a thousand years—and he feels that he has already lived five or six hundred—he will not forget what happened that day. His mother sweetly said: “Very smart, Mollie, very nice! What a pretty hat, and what lovely boots!” She said this in a half-bantering way; leaving a loophole through which she might wriggle if quoted, or overheard; only joking, of course, but giving the girl a few kind words, just to cheer her up. What had Mollie to look forward to, after all, the poor girl? Who was she, what was she? A nothing, a nobody, from nowhere. “What lovely boots! And those beads—where did you get them? Mm! Gloves too, eh? Somebody must have left you a fortune.”

Then Mollie said, all in one eager breath: “You know that
broken gramophone Mr. Small give me? That young man Lygo what works for Mr. Looby, ’e ment it for me, an’ when Mr. Small give it me I took it to ’im, an’ ’e took it to a party—she lives up Maida Vale—an’ she sez a pound, an’ ’e sez four, and she sez thirty shilling——”

“—Hm!”

“—She sez thirty shilling, mum, an’ ’e sez four-pun ten, and she sez two quid, an’ ’e sez four-pun, an’ she sez two-pun ten is my last offer, an’ ’e sez three-pun ten’s my last word if I was to drop dead this minute, and she sez three quid—take it or leave it. So ’e sez done, and that’s ’ow I got the money.”

“Gramophones, eh?” said Mrs. Small; and suddenly an arctic cold filled the house, although it was sweltering in the July heat. “Gramophones. Very nice. Very nice!”

His mother appeared to be curiously contented. She had the air of a theoretician who, let out of a lunatic asylum after twenty years of unjust incarceration, pinches the corners of his mouth and eyes into a knowing smile for the demoralisation of his apologetic persecutors.

At supper time she said naïvely to her husband: “Oh, by the way, what happened to the gramophone?”

The old man changed colour. His eyes flickered. He dropped his fork with a clatter, picked it up with a growl, blew his nose like a foghorn, made a knot of his eyebrows, and thundered: “Gremaphones, schmemaphones! Dancing, singing, they want already! Gremaphones!”

“Where is it then?”

“Where
is
it? A rubbish—
where
is it! Ask this bleddy little murderer!”—he threatened Charles Small with the crust of a slice of soft bread. “——You want gremaphones? Ask your, your, your, your little murderer! Gremaphones!”

Charles Small knew that something dreadful was going to happen because his mother was speaking calmly, saying: “You threw it away?”

“What did you want I should do with it?”

“Well, it’s a pity. It could be somebody could have made use of it.”

“Use of it, schmoose of it!”

“To give thirty shillings, and then throw it away. All right. You’re the master. You know best.”

Straining his lungs until the veins in his temples became blue,
his father shouted: “Five shillings! Once and a thousand times for all, five!
Five!
FIVE!”

“Listen. Srul! Why did you do it? What made you do it? What for?”

“What, what for? What do you mean, why did I do it what for?”

“Did I ever do anything to you?”

“What does she mean, what? Do, do, do, schmoo, bloo! What do you mean, what?”

“Srul, tell me the honest truth. Did—you—give—that—gramophone—to—that—girl?”

“Girl?”

“Yes, Srul. Girl.”

“Leave me alone with your gremaphones!” the old man shouted, pounding the table with his fists. “Niggle, niggle, niggle—nag, nag, nag! Gremaphones!”

The louder the old man bellowed, the more plainly he was defeated. The more emphatically he swore, the more obviously he was lying. Now he let out a yell that made the glasses dance on the sideboard, while the windows rattled and the house shivered, as he called upon God to strike him dead if what his wife said had the least grain of truth in it. He tore his hair, cried, brandished a fork, picked up a glass of water and put it down again; gripped the edge of the tablecloth as if to drag all the dishes down clattering to rack and ruin about his knees, at which his wife cried
No!
—so he tore a slice of bread to pieces instead. He brandished his fists over the head of his son, called him a “neglectful pig”—God knows where he had picked up that expression—and struck him with an envelope he had not dared to open because he knew that it enclosed a bill for water rates.

“Can you look me straight in the face and tell me that you didn’t give that girl that gramophone?” she asked, when he paused for breath.

“What do they take me for, what? A millionaire, I should give gremaphones? This piece of bread should choke me if I gave gremaphones!” His trembling hand found a bit of crust which he dramatically thrust into his mouth and tried to swallow but fear had dried his mouth, and the crust was dry too. So it choked him. Then the uproar was really terrible. He tore at his collar, knocked over his chair, and seemed to dance, while his
wife threw her head back and screamed, until Mollie came running in from the kitchen with a glass of water. The old man drank, and the crust was washed down.

“A nerrow escape!” he gasped.

“You see? It serves you right—you shouldn’t swear false.”

“False? May I——” he caught Mollie’s eye, winked, made a face, shook his head and said: “Mollie, I didn’t gave you no gremaphone, did I?”

Mollie said: “Of course you did!”

“Deliberate bleddy liar!”—
deliberate
was another word he had recently picked up and found a use for in every conversation—“deliberate bleddy liar! I told you to chuck it out—to chuck it out I deliberately told you!”

“Chuck! Chuck!” said Mrs. Small, scandalised. “Who says chuck?
Throw
it out!”

“Throw, schmow!”

“You give it to me,” Mollie persisted. “After I got it ment you give it me, and Mr. Lygo sold it for me for three pound.”

“She makes me out a liar? A liar she makes me out? Kick her out from the bleddy house!”

“Oh, oright, I give a week’s notice. I may be in service but I’m not going to be made out to be a liar. I might as well be in Bedlam,” said Mollie, and stamped out of the room slamming the door.

All that had been said that evening amounted to nothing more than a hurried, whispered outline of what was now to come. It was a mere tuning and warming-up of instruments. First, Charles Small’s mother turned to her son and said: “You see? A liar is always found out!” Then, rapping the table with a
teaspoon
, as a conductor raps the music-stand with a baton, she started the overture to a mad opera.

Charles Small, in other, comparatively good-humoured periods of reminiscence, tells himself that if he could have been a musician, he might have got the inspiration for a terrible comedy out of that scene. He would have needed the London Symphony Orchestra, some bagpipes, the Mills Brothers, the Duncan Sisters, a dinner-gong, several bombardons, a fishwife, a sergeant-major, and a Cuban band complete with maracas and ass’s jawbones rattling with loose teeth. Technically, it would have been difficult to put over as it deserved. It would have been necessary to discover a pair of versatile geniuses who could sing down all
other noises for three hours and forty minutes in duet, dancing at the same time. It would take Chaliapin, the Marx Brothers, and Henry Irving to play the part of Mr. Small. The Prima Donna, Mrs. Small, would have to be compounded of Sarah Bernhardt, Koringa (the lady sword-swallower), Dorothy Parker, Little Orphan Annie, Tillie The Toiler, Catherine de Medici, and Gertrude Stein.

As for the libretto, he could write that himself:

Mr. Small strikes his son on the head with envelope containing final demand for water rates.

Then it started all over again. Having thundered in the voice of Chaliapin in
Ivan
the
Terrible
, the old man, black in the face, opened big white hands and called upon his mammy in the voice of Al Jolson; while she, on Mimi’s deathbed, came up with a double-take, and went into a Desdemoniac frenzy, before she passed away in convulsions like Cleopatra. It went on into the small hours, breaking young Charles’s sleep. When he came down to breakfast at eight o’clock next morning his mother was red-eyed but triumphant. His father had gone downstairs sullenly to open the shop. He could not eat any breakfast; food would choke him; the sight of it would make him sick; he couldn’t touch a thing. Little Charles was worried, but he ate everything that was put before him. His mother refused to speak to Mollie, even to give her an order, so she sighed while she carried down a tray loaded with eggs, smoked haddock, hot rolls, and tea in her own martyred hands. The voice of the old man came up: “Take it away! Away! Didn’t I told you, I’m choked?”

Yet between two sighs the plates were emptied.

Charles went to school while his father, walking up and down the shop, waited for business.

It
is
all
very
well,
all
very
well,
and
all
very
funny,
says Charles now, kicking his left foot with his right,
all
very
fine
and
large.
But
damn
my
eyes,
why
didn’t
I
admit
that
it
was
I
who
broke
the
spring?
For
God’s
sake,
what
was
I
afraid
of?

He is far from well. The bed rolls and the bedroom spins. The neat coils, nicely packed in his abdomen, are sliding loose. He winds them tighter with a tremendous effort. Still they slide. He throws his weight upon that which should control them, but there is a dull snap … and then he is hopelessly entangled in something blue, slippery, and interminable—struggling with his own guts.

H
IS
father called himself a “gentlemen’s hoser”. He never missed an opportunity of giving you one of his cards upon which, heavily printed in Old English type, was the inscription:

Thinking of this card Charles Small becomes alternately red with shame and white with anger, until his face feels like an electric sign. It was his mother’s idea, of course: who else could have thought of such a thing? Oh, that woman, that woman—if only he could get his hands on her throat, he would shake her as a terrier shakes a rat! He knew it all now: crumb by crumb, shard by shard, splinter by splinter he has picked up the bits and glued them together into something so nearly whole that he thinks he knows the shape, size, and pattern of it. And having stuck this rubbish together, what has he got? A lead-glazed, big-bellied, narrow-necked, crockery pot, neither useful nor decorative that had better not have been made. He wants to send it back to the dust with one savage kick.

His father’s name was Yisroel Schmulowitz. He left Cracow in Galicia in the 1880s, before he was twenty years old, because he was about to be called up to serve his time in the Army. His mother, wailing and moaning, tearing to pieces her
shaitel
, had begged him to leave her and go, because in the Army he would associate with rough men and eat the flesh of dead swine. (A
shaitel
is a hideous wig, parted in the middle, which orthodox Jewesses, having shaved their heads, were supposed to wear after they were married in case they became appetising to strange men. Charles Small’s grandmother, at her best, could not have looked much more attractive than a plucked chicken. He had
never seen her, but on the strength of a flattering photograph you wanted to tie her up with a piece of thin twine and throw her into a pot of boiling water, the old fowl.) So Yisroel
Schmulowitz
ran for his life, and reached England with a few
groschen
in his pocket. He was not without a trade: he had been
apprenticed
to a bootmaker in some Cracovian suburb. A man named Noman, a philanthropist, picked him up and found him a job with a cobbler, for whom he sweated for several years, earning an honest living. He spent most of his money on clothes—
cut-away
coats, fancy waistcoats, tight patent-leather boots, spats, hats. Every Sunday he dressed himself up and walked in the park with his friend Schwartz. Twirling their moustaches and swinging their walking-sticks they strolled through Mayfair and Regent Street, where they made eyes at all the girls. Later, perhaps, they went to a music hall. Crime does not pay—murder will out. Charles’s mother had dragged out of her husband the scandalous story of the offering of a cup of cocoa to a loose
gentlewoman
, a “sport”. This beautiful anonymous one said that she thought him “quaint and charming”, and drank the cocoa with gusto. (The subsequent battle raged for three days, after which no cocoa was ever brought into the house. Once, when the old man employed an assistant named Cadbury, Mrs. Small screamed: “So you can’t get her out of your mind, is that what you are?”—so that Cadbury had to go.)

The time came when a marriage broker told Yisroel
Schmulowitz
that he was good-looking, well-dressed, self-supporting, and marriageable, and that a beautiful young woman of good family was willing to look at him.

“What’s she like?”

“An Englisher gel—lovely!”

“Dark? Fair?”

“Medium.”

“Tall? Short?”

“Middling. What do you want? Jersey Lilies? Lily Lengtry? If I say a beautiful gel, it’s a beautiful gel. Look, see, and if you don’t like her, I’ll hang myself!”

So he introduced young Schmulowitz to Millie, the least marriageable of six daughters. She was a screaming coquette. Four of her sisters were married, and she hated them with a bitter, deadly hate. Her unmarried sister had a queer leg, and she limped, so that Millie loved her. When Yisroel Schmulowitz
came into the house, healthy and handsome and eminently presentable, Millie’s heart melted. She had five hundred pounds of dowry, and the young man had fallen in love with her. She made conditions. First and foremost, she could not marry a man who would impose upon her the name of Schmulowitz.

“So what’s the matter mit mein name?”

“
With!
With your name! Not
mit
. Not
mein
.
With my
name!”

“Mein father’s name was Schmulowitz. Should I be ashamed from it?”

“Ashamed from it!
Of
it!
Of!
”

“Of. Let it be of. If my father’s name——”

“—You are not your father.”

“Schmul was a great man. In the bible read—read in the bible! Hannah was married to Elkanah, so she lies down and gives a son——”

“—So that’s what you are! Hm! A nice way to talk!”

“So what’s what I am? What did I said wrong?”

“What did I said wrong! What did I
say
wrong?”

“Say. Hannah brought Schmul to Eli, so it was he got to be a prophet.”

“You are not a prophet now. You are not in Palestine now. Millie Schmulowitz! I’d be so ashamed! Millie Schmulowitz—never!”

“What do you want I should call myself, what?”

She thought of Smiles, Wits, de Witt, and Mule; but finally decided on Small.

“But what are you ashamed of, what?”

“Who’s ashamed?”

“What’s
your
name? Moses.”

“Moss!”

“What’s the matter with Moses? Moses was good enough to lead you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage, wasn’t he?”

“You’re not in Egypt now. Schmulowitz! I should call myself Schmulowitz! Small!”

“Let it be Small,” he said, heavily.

“It sounds like the same thing, really. And Yisroel. It’s not … it’s not …”

“—It’s not what? What, it’s not?”

“Listen, you’re in England now.”

“So I’m in England—so what’s the matter, what?”

“Yisroel! It makes people laugh. Yis
roel
!
Rollo! Make it Rollo—that’s a nice name. Rollo Small.”

“My name isn’t good enough, so I’m not good enough. Good day! Go find a Rollo, a Schmollo! Good-bye!”

She did not care whether he came or went, lived or died, but she had told all her friends that he was desperately in love with her. He, for his part, was sick and tired of the whole affair, and she could see it. One syllable, now—one brusque
Go
might have sent Yisroel Schmulowitz stamping away. Sensing this, she cried, and said, through her tears: “It’s not what you’re called, it’s what you are that counts!”

She had got this out of some novelette, no doubt. It was a little too deep for Schmulowitz, who in any case was powerless in the presence of a weeping woman. He cried himself when he saw a woman shedding tears, thinking of his mother, so this fool, missing a heaven-sent opportunity of giving himself a better wife, and Charles Small a different mother, pulled out a silk handkerchief, saying: “Rollo, Schmollo, Wollo, Bollo, call me what you like!”

“A rose by any other name would smell,” she sobbed.

So they were engaged. He had to give her a ring, of course, but he had very little money to spend. Millie’s youngest sister Lily was married to a prosperous photographer who had given her an engagement ring that cost £85—the whole family had seen the receipt; after which young Lily had acquired a maddening habit of touching her hair, adjusting her blouse, and emphasising her lightest word with a queenly gesture of the left hand, so that wherever Millie looked she saw the diamond flash.

“Stop showing off with your rubbishing bit of glass!” she screamed, at last.

“Bit of glass, eh? Ha-ha! You Wouldn’t say no to such a bit of glass. What’s the matter, are you jealous, or what?”

“Ha-ha!
I
should be jealous of a rubbishing bit of a thing like that?”

“Oh yes. We all know. We all know all about that, Millie. We all know all about the rings your young man gives you.”

Trust Lily to be a bitch! Every one of those damnable sisters was a bitch: three of them were born bitches, two had achieved bitchery, and one had had bitchery thrust upon her. They had
to be so in order to survive. They were perpetually feeling one another for a fresh sore spot—which it was never difficult to find—they were sore to the core, those hysterical fools. They enjoyed being hurt: it gave them something to cry about. If, by some miracle, you managed not to hurt them they would tread on their own corns to make themselves scream. They would stop at nothing, to put you in the wrong. Charles Small once saw his Aunt Sarah scraping her eyes with a match-stick in order to draw tears that might wring the heart of his mother with remorse for having hurt Sarah’s feelings by saying that a certain sky-blue woollen jumper “showed off her figure too much”. Sarah had a bosom like a pair of overblown pomegranates, and made the most of it—in the end it got her a tobacconist with three branch shops and a motor-car. But when Millie, who was flat-chested, expressed righteous indignation and virtuous disgust at her pride in these peerless globes, these conspicuous founts of motherhood, Sarah, having said a few never-to-be-forgotten things about “it being better to have a proper figure than something like pimples on your chest” rushed into the kitchen and poked herself in the eye with a match to get in the first weep. What a battle there was then!—complete with forced marches, dark strategies, dirty tactics, espionage, attack, counter-attack, entrenchment, night assaults, sieges and sorties! It lasted three months—in which time Lily and Pearl, having formed a secret alliance, carried a blitzkrieg to Becky because she had said that Ruth was the best cook in the family.

However when Millie remembered Lily’s ring she wanted one like it, which the cobbler Schmulowitz could not afford to buy. He had his eye on a bargain priced at £15—a wretched little cluster of chip-diamonds around a flawed sapphire no bigger than a split pea. Millie had hysterics…. So she should be the laughing-stock of her friends! So she should be ashamed to look anybody in the face for the rest of her life! Oh, oh, oh what had she done to deserve it?

Schmulowitz said that later on, please God, he would give her pearls, and diamonds, and rubies, and anything she fancied. In the meantime, why spend money on rings when there was a living to make?

“Rubies! How comes, rubies! Who wears rubies? You’re in England now! And sapphires—oh, how they’ll laugh!”

Yisroel Schmulowitz, who was already beginning to hate the
sight of her, and who still had a little spirit left in him, said “Give me back the ring and finish!”

Then she wept heartbrokenly until she had a clever idea. She went to her father and said: “You’re giving me five hundred pounds. Now look—a diamond is as good as money. Buy me a ring, now, for a hundred pounds.”

Mr. Moss, her father, said: “Was fur meshuggass is dis? Fur a hündred pfund a diamant? Ich, soll a——”

“I won’t marry him without,” she said.

At this, Mr. Moss, who had been gathering himself for a
devastating
charge, pulled himself back on his haunches and became thoughtful. Then he said: “Nu, nu vell, a diamant is already wie gelt”—and he took her to Black Lion Yard, where she chose a diamond ring that cost £92, which he gave to Schmulowitz, who later at a little engagement party took it out of a square, velveteen-lined box, and put it on the third finger of Millie’s left hand. Healths were drunk. Everyone admired the ring. Lily bit her lips with envy, and Millie was as happy as she could be. Schmulowitz was proud to be associated with such fine people, but he was unaccountably miserable. He admired the brilliants set in the ring, but he would have looked with greater pleasure upon the cracked sapphire that he had bought with his own money. He gave it to Millie, but she did not like to be seen wearing it. Who wore sapphires? Diamonds were the thing.

This was the beginning of the end of Yisroel Schmulowitz. He had sacrificed his father’s name, and let himself be called “Small”. To his first name, Yisroel, he clung with desperate stubbornness. Millie reddened her eyes a dozen times with
weeping
, begging him to call himself Rollo. But he held out until, at last, Millie went to Nathan, the Photographer, a clever man, and (she never forgave him for this) asked him to reason with her fiancé. Nathan, the Photographer (she never stopped hating him), went and wrestled with Yisroel Small. He said:

“Now look here. When in Rome, you’ve got to do as Rome does. Honest, this is England.”

“What’s the metter, what?”

“Nothing. But what do you want to be pig-headed for? What do you want to call yourself Yisroel for? Think, and you’ll see! Yisroel!” the photographer laughed. “You’re going to get married. Am I right?”

There was an alarming pause, which Nathan, the
Photographer
,
did not fail to note, before Yisroel Small said: “So?”

“Listen. English people can’t pronounce, they can’t
say
all these names. When you’re in Rome, do as Rome does——”

“—I’m not in Rome.”

“That’s just it. You’re in England. When in England, do as England does.”

“What’s the metter from mein name, what?”

“It’s foreign. You’re going into business.”

“Is already in the King’s pelace a person called Battenburg. I put new heels yesterday on a proper gentleman from the Russian Ambassy—Protopopoff. Protopopoff!”

“Now look here. This is England.”

“England, Schmengland—what’s the metter with mein name?”

“There’s a prejudice against Joosh people.
Yisroel!
Every
body
’ll laugh.”

“Let ’em laugh!”

“Now look. Yisroel is only another word for Israel.”

“So?”

“Israel is a name like any other name. Israel, Rollo—what’s the difference?”

“All right then, Yisroel, Israel—let it be Israel!”

“No, wait a minute—‘Israel’ only makes matters worse.”