The Thousand Deaths of Mr Small (41 page)

It could not be denied that I. Small had done his bit. He dressed, up, and showed at least three inches of stiff cuff—pink cuff, brilliantly starched. The ladies of Lewisham went for him in a big way. Here, between good laundering and the careful
barbering
of a ginger moustache, here was Dark Male Ecstasy. If it had not been for the old man, the establishment would not have lasted three months. He talked, and hawked, and snorted like the oaf that he was; but looking at him you would have put him down as a visiting diplomat, a Minister Plenipotentiary.

The ladies of the locality preferred him to Millie Small. The old man strutted like a peacock, while the Missus screamed like a pea-hen; until at last, when she had hysterics, I. Small took her by the shoulders and shook her, shouting: “Enough! No more bleddy drawers, no more bleddy elastic! Ribbon, schmibbon! Back to the bleddy boots, or to bleddy beggary!”

It sounded like King Richard III before the Battle: “Back to the bleddy boots, or to bleddy beggary!”

So, they went back—Millie was so ashamed—to cobblery. The old man’s working dress consisted in an old pair of
evening-dress
trousers, carpet slippers, and a flannel shirt. He kept up his trousers with a belt, clasped by a buckle with which he might have knocked down a cow—only he would have run away from a cow. Then he was quite happy. He was doing what he knew, and he had company, the atheistic cobbler, Lizzard, from whose conversation he derived much pleasure, if not profit.

One day, in a slack period in August, when everyone was at the seaside, a big man dressed in khaki stamped in, twirled a pair of light moustaches at I. Small, and said in a rasping voice: “Our snob’s dead. Want to stud some boots?”

I. Small attempted feebly to twirl his own moustache right back at the Quartermaster Sergeant, saying: “So?”

The Quartermaster said: “Put the business your way, if you make it worth my while. Be worth your while, you make it worth my while.”

“Certainly!” said I. Small.

“Right you are then.”

After the door had slammed behind the soldier, the old man said: “A bit of luck, thenk God, thenk God!”

Lizzard, who was whetting his knives on a well-worn stone, looked up sharply and snapped: “Thank
God?
What d’you mean,
God?
”

“What does he mean, what do I mean? God!”

“May I harst, Mr. Small, exactly what d’you mean by God?”

Charles Small was present at the time, and he saw that the old man was stumped. But he came up fighting with: “Mean, schmean! God! I said God!
Na
!
”

Lizzard purred: “You believe in God, Mr. Small.”

“Bleddy-well yes!”

“All right, sir. Is God good?”

“What the bleddy hell does he think, with his ‘Is God good?’ Certainly! A bird lives from the
scheiss
from a horse—God is good!”

“Very well,” said Lizzard. “God is good. God is all-good. Is He all-powerful?”

“Certainly. What then should he be?”

“But—par’m me—are there bad things in this world of ours, Comrade Small? Is there … indigestion, corns, cancer,
toothache
, hunger, thirst, eh? Are these good?”

“No bleddy good,” said I. Small.

“Evil, then, eh?”

“No bleddy good.”

“Now you say that your God is all-good and all-powerful. If your God is all-good and all-powerful, I harst you how you reconcile an all-good and all-powerful God with the existence of Evil! Eh?”

I. Small made a noise like coals sliding off a rusty shovel; then lost his temper and shouted: “No argument! There must be Something, and God is good!”

“Prove it,” said Lizzard. “D’you believe in a life after death?”

“What the bleddy rubbishing hell is this?” cried I. Small. “When you’re dead, you’re done for, gefinished! What new madness is this? Life after death, beggar it! Schmife after death, the bleddy fool!”

Lizzard began to say: “Then how do you reconcile——”

I. Small, very angry, fumbled in a pocket, took out some money, and slammed it down on the bench, saying: “No
arguments
! Nothing but your chains to lose, all right. But God is
good, d’you hear?
Na!
A week’s wages! Wrap up your bleddy knives and go to beggary!”

The old man had given Lizzard the sack every week for years. Now the atheistic cobbler took it in silence. He put his few tools into a little linen bag, picked up his money, and went out without another word. I. Small was first disconcerted, then enraged. He cried: “What did I said, idiot? God is good! By you is a crime?”

Lizzard slammed the door, and shambled away. I. Small turned to Charles. “What did I say wrong, Charley?”

“Nothing, Dad.”

“I didn’t said nothing wrong. He’s a good man, Lizzard. It’s all right. I kicked him out of the bleddy place a thousand times. Did I said something? ‘God is good’—sis a crime? All right, never mind, to-morrow he’ll come back, the drunkard.”

The old man went back to work, disconsolate, for he had a fondness for the courageous Lizzard, who denied God and spat upon the State. I. Small could visualise Lizzard, somehow, as one of the desperate men in the breathless Battle of Sidney Street, when the Anarchists, as they were called, opened fire on the police, and a bright young Home Secretary named Winston Churchill called out the Guards.

I. Small shook his head and said: “Sis a heathen, a—a—a Atheist, a Intellectual.”

Charles Small remembers that, next morning, munching buttered toast, the old man, obedient to an imperious knock, went to open the side door. There stood a big blue policeman. Startled out of his wits, the old man choked on a crust, spraying the policeman with moist fragments. Charles went to tell his mother, but when they came down the policeman was gone and I. Small was crying at his bench. Lizzard, the atheistic cobbler, had killed himself—cut his throat. Before doing so he had addressed a little package to I. Small. This package, screwed up in a brown paper bag, contained two paper-backed books:
The
Age
of
Reason
by Tom Paine, and
Free
Will
and,
Determinism
by Goodness-Knows-Who. These were his treasures. He had nothing else; only a few razor-edged leather-knives, a spare pair of trousers, two flannel shirts, a broken watch, and a bloody blanket. There were also his boots. He had soled and heeled them only a week before, sewing on thick leather of the finest quality,
hammering
iron tips into heel and toe, and saying: “These will last me a good seven years.”

B
UT
Charles Small’s passion for the theatre had become a monomania. Opening a boiled egg, for instance, he would rant and roar like Othello: “… I took by the throat the circumcised dog and smote him—thus! …” Stabbing a piece of pudding with his fork he muttered: “… Cæsar, now be still! I killed not thee with half so good a will! …”

At first the old man said: “
Sha!
Shakespeare!” But when, at a family gathering, Charles was invited to recite, and let fly with:

And so on to:

—then all the sisters, who were very particular about their feminine hygiene, looked aghast. (Later, Becky went to the Library and took out a copy of
The
Tragedy
of
King
Lear
and went through it carefully, in search of the spicy bits.) Millie did not know where to look. Nathan, the Photographer, looked grave and shook his heavy head. His son, Stanley, the handsome one, had decided to go in for Diseases of Women instead of Dentistry; he was such a nice-looking fellow that it was generally agreed that few women could resist the temptation to be professionally fumbled by him. And here was this
nebbisch,
Charley, with his stenches and his sulphurous pits!

It was generally agreed that the idea of acting had to be knocked out of the boy’s head. I. Small looked stern, and took a firm hold of a rolled-up copy of the Sunday
Referee.

Later, Millie went to Nathan and tearfully asked what on earth she could do. It was more than she could bear. The little girl, Priscilla, was picking up Charley’s dirty talk; she, too, had caught the infection and wanted to go on the stage. Srul, she said, was as good as gold but … he was a foreign fellow—he could not understand. “Nathan, do me a favour—talk to Charley,” she said.

So, one evening, the Jesuitical Nathan dropped in as it were
en
passant,
for a casual visit. The old man poured a glass of whisky. Millie buzzed about like a blue-arsed fly, preparing a monumental tea—nobody was going to say that there was a lack of food in the house. Nathan ate and drank everything that was put before him; he was one of those slow, deliberate, insatiable eaters. And he talked in the same way that he ate—ponderously, chewing every word thirty-two times before spitting it out. (A Cockney charwoman, whom he dismissed on the spot, irritated to the verge of madness by his long drawn-out periods, had said: “Come to the bleedin’ point, Mister—either piss or get off the pot!”) Charles Small sensed funny business. It was in the air. It was not like Uncle Nathan to go out of his way to pay visits to poor relations, and when at last the man said to him: “Let’s go for a walk, Charley. Come on, I’ll take you to the theatre”—why, then, Charles Small smelled a rat. However, he was not going to let suspicion come between him and a little free
entertainment
, so he went with Nathan, who, to his astonishment and delight, carried him off to a music hall. They rode in a cab. All the way, Nathan made sly allusions to the precariousness of the Stage as a profession. The life of an actor was a hard one, a squalid, wretched, anxious life … your theatrical people lived from hand to mouth, never knowing where the next meal was coming from; begging, borrowing, stealing, lying, writing stumer cheques, and ending in the gutter…. Actors lived miserably in bug-infested furnished rooms, for which landladies, justly suspicious, demanded rent in advance…. They had no roots, no homes, no lives of their own…. Who ever heard of an actor coming home to a nice little house after an honest day’s work, with a regular Friday pay envelope in his pocket, and sitting down in a familiar arm-chair by a nice fire while his respectable wife took off his shoes and helped him put on his slippers, and the Little Ones called him Daddy, and the kettle began to sing, and a clean housemaid made music with cups and saucers and spoons,
while, like incense, there came the aroma of muffins, and all that? … No, the actor was outside in the raw night, coughing in the fog, threadbare, shivering in the rain….

So Nathan ran on until the chicken-heart of Charles Small grew cold in his pitiful little breast. But at last they reached a famous music hall, and there was richness! Everybody was on the bill. He wept when Albert Chevalier sang:

And he screamed with laughter at the grotesqueries of T. E.
Dunville
. A trick cyclist got up to look like a tramp, who rode on only one wheel, sent him into convulsions. So did an
intoxicated-looking
lady who sang a song called “
I’m
One
of
the
Ruins
That
Cromwell
Knocked
About
a
Bit
”. Charles Small may be getting things a little mixed up, but he thinks he remembers seeing the mighty Cinquevalli supporting on his broad back a platform upon which a little man sat at a piano, while he juggled three cannon-balls…. Or was it the great Rastelli, who balanced a screw of tissue-paper on his nose, simultaneously juggling a match-box and a match so that at a certain moment the match caught fire, when he set light to the tissue-paper and, when it burned down to the tip of his nose, miraculously balanced the ash? It was an enchanted evening. The memory of it is somewhat blurred, so that he cannot quite remember whether it was on that occasion or another that he heard Leo Dryden singing “
Don’t
Go
Down
the
Mine,
Daddy
,” or Harry Champion going off like a machine-gun with “
Any Old Iron
” … or was it Maidie Scott singing “
The
Naughty Little Bird on Mary’s Hat
”? … or J. Laurier, coming out with “
I Do Like a Nice Mince Pie
”
?
…

Whatever it was, he was enchanted. Then Nathan, the
Photographer
, proceeded to disenchant him. (Nathan, by the way, had been having the time of his life.) But after the show was over he became solemn, ominous. “These are successful theatrical people,” he said. “And how many of them are there? Ten? Twenty? Thirty? And how many unsuccessful ones do you think there are? I’ll tell you: Hundreds of Thousands. How many T. E. Dunvilles are there, making a hundred pounds a week?
And how many comedians who are lucky enough to earn a hundred pounds a year? How many Harry Champions are there? How many Albert Chevaliers? How many names do you see printed in big letters on top of the bill, in the West End, worth a hundred pounds a week? And how many do you see in little tiny letters, lucky to be engaged at all in the West End for a dirty fiver, and only for a week at that? Work out the chances, Charley, work it out. The Stage is like—painting pictures, like book writing—you have to be one in a million. One in a million gets his name in big letters. The other nine hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine don’t know where their next bit of bread is coming from. And then again, Charley, these big pots—how long do they last? You saw them. They’re middle-aged men. For twenty, thirty years they lived like dogs in dog kennels to get where they are now. And now they’ve got where they are, they’re old. Three, four, five, six more years, and they’ll be in the gutter again. And they,” said Nathan, tapping Charles’s shoulder, “they are the cream of the Profession, geniuses! See where they end—look!”

It happened that at this moment a horribly dilapidated old man shuffled on broken boots up to a queue that was lining up for the next show and, filling his lungs, wheezed: “Ladies and Gentlemen—impersonations of characters out of Charles Dickens!”

“There, do you see?” said Nathan, the Photographer.

The old busker was a deplorable spectacle. He was stamped indelibly with the marks of the doss-house, where you could get a lousy bed for fourpence a night, the ante-rooms of the Abyss. What remained of his overcoat was fastened with safety-pins, one of which had come loose, so that it was obvious that this was his only garment, apart from his trousers and his ruined boots. He wore a cracked old billycock hat which he must have begged at somebody’s back door because it was so much too large for him that it pressed down his ears. He looked like a starved, sickly spaniel that has made its way out of a pond into which some compassionate man had thrown it to put it out of its misery. He had been clean-shaven, once upon a time.

Having attracted the attention of the queue, he said: “Ladies and Gentlemen, Uriah Heep!”—and proceeded to wring his hands, and leer, and cringe, and whine: “… My ’umble abode, Master Copperfield …” until at last he went up and down the line holding out his hat. He collected about sixpence-halfpenny.
Charles Small gave him twopence. Nathan gave him nothing, but, leading the boy away, went on talking.

“You see, Charley? The people you saw to-night, they are one in a million. They are geniuses. Even so, they’ve got to have influence, luck, something special. The average, the ordinary ones, they end up like that—and him an educated man; you could tell by the way he talked…. Now, Charley, there’s nothing in it. A good steady job, a good steady job. If you want acting, there’s plenty of Dramatic Societies. Then, with a good steady job, and a home of your own, and a pound in your pocket, you can act to your heart’s content. Do you follow me?”

Loathing himself, Charles Small remembers that he followed Nathan, the Photographer. That poor old tramp with his
well-trained
husky voice, shivering in the cold of the night and cringing for pennies, impressed him profoundly.

He gulped, and nodded at Nathan, the Photographer: oh yes, he followed him all right.

*

Lord, Lord, Lord—how sour these memories can get! Charles Small remembers one summer when, Millie Small being pregnant, and hysterical, he was taken with Priscilla into the country. There was, as usual, quite a to-do about it. Millie Small knew only one place out of London and that was Brighton. There was a conference. The family was divided against itself. Nathan, the Photographer, suggested Scotland, the farther away the better, he thought, no doubt. But Pearl’s husband knew a man who had a friend who owned a farm in Essex, near a place named St. Osyth, where Millie and the two children could stay for next to nothing, and where the air was healthy.

Charles Small remembers it as one of the greyest places on God’s green earth. It was surrounded by grey mud-flats and muddy grey water, over which grey gulls flapped perpetually, squawking. Sometimes a gaggle of grey wild geese passed in V-formation, disconsolately honking. The farm-house was grey, the farmer was grey—and incidentally his name was Gray. But old Gray was not a bad fellow, and Charles took to him. He knew little, but what he knew he knew that he knew. I. Small, who visited his family every week-end, felt superior to old Gray, with his
outlandish
accent and unkempt moustache; he patronised him, and gave him a fivepenny cigar, which the farmer crammed into an
old pipe. The old man and Millie did not like the smell of Gray’s farm—the scents of wood-smoke and horse dung were distasteful to them. Good enough for
goyim
—they preferred petrol, and the cones of incense you burned in a bedroom after the invalid has used a bedpan!

I. Small, prompted by his wife, made the children look in the opposite direction while a cow defecated, calling it a “bleddy, uncivilised beast”—presumably because it did not wipe itself and pull a chain. He and Millie observed the mating of a boar and a sow—thank God the children were not there to have ideas put into their bleddy heads—and the old man snorted: “
Khazza!
Pig! You see, Millie? A
khazza
isn’t called a
khazza
for nothing.” Also—trust I. Small—he achieved what few men have achieved in a ridiculous way: he was bitten by a lamb. He was captivated by the little bounding bundle of wool, and tried to play with it. Farmer Gray was weaning it from its mother. He dragged the lamb up to a pan of milk, dipped his finger into the milk, and poked it into the lamb’s mouth, the idea being that the lamb should learn to lap, and hence to eat rather than suck. I. Small had a go. And the lamb bit his finger. The farmer was vastly amused. He said: “Never ye mind, Mister, you come and look at this”—and led him to a dark, odoriferous place with a half-door.

I. Small, already unnerved by the thought of lamb-poisoning, could see nothing but pitch darkness. “So what is?” he asked.

“Come in,” said the farmer.

He drew I. Small after him, and prodded the darkness with his stick, whereupon with an angry bellow there appeared a huge black bull with blood-shot eyes, petulantly chewing his cud and showing two neat rows of white teeth. I. Small tripped over his feet and fell backwards into the muck, bellowing: “Take him away, bleddy beggary!”—so that the bull was frightened. He also fought a losing battle with a gander. He thought, no doubt, that geese were merely birds, and offered the great white gander a piece of chewing-gum. The bird rushed at him, hissing like a snake, and pecked him in the knee. I. Small called it a murderer and ran away, but not before the angry gander had got in a shrewd blow on the right cheek of his bottom. After that he was suspicious of domestic animals. When Priscilla dropped into his lap a newly-hatched chick, he fell into the fire and singed his hair.