The Thousand Deaths of Mr Small (6 page)

“My feet she throws into my face! I know certain people
who’d take size eight, if they didn’t go about like Chinamen, all squeezed up! I’d rather have big feet than bite my nails!”

All the Moss girls had big feet, but Sarah’s feet were biggest, and her husband the tobacconist bit his nails. He was a passionate nail-biter. He bit his nails as a drunkard drinks, so that he went in for secretive economies. He exercised a sort of self-indulgent self-control, like a terrified alcoholic who keeps an inch or two of gin in the bottle overnight to keep him going until the bars open next day. He bit nine of his finger-nails until they bled, making them last until Sunday morning. But he never touched the nail on the little finger of his left hand: this was his cellar, his secret hoard, his plantation. In six days it grew an eighth of an inch. He hurried through breakfast on Sunday morning and then locked himself into the sitting-room with the
News
of
the
World
and, with a shudder of ecstasy, nibbled off the first sliver.

Pearl shouted: “Sha! Sha!” To I. Small she said graciously: “Sisterly love. It’s only sisterly love.”

“I don’t know, what’s the matter with a shoemaker?” said Becky, in her leering, sneering way.

I. Small nodded, smiling at her, and said: “Qvidel right! What’s the matter, what?”—at which old Mr. Moss felt his beard and looked at Becky through half closed-eyes. Becky had a nose like a squashed pear and irregular eyes. Her ears were set at odd angles. She would have married anything that wore trousers. But as soon as she had said what she said Millie wept again.

Then the tobacconist shouted: “Whose nails are they? Do I ask
you
for nails? Do I bite
your
nails? If it isn’t one thing it’s another. Now it’s nails! What d’you want me to bite, screws? Mind your own business! I’ll bite what I bloomingwell like! Leave me alone!”

Ruth shrieked at her husband: “You let a creature like that talk to me like that? And you call yourself a man?”

The estate agent, half-heartedly, said: “Talk like a gentleman!”

The tobacconist cried: “First teach your wife to talk like a lady.”

“So now I’m not a lady,” said Ruth, in tears. “If I was a man I’d tear him to pieces.”

Then the estate agent rose abruptly, knocking over his chair, and said: “I didn’t come here to be insulted. I wish you
good-night
.” He started to leave the room, but his wife clung to his coat-tails, sobbing:

“Stay, stay!”

“Stay to be insulted?”

“To please
me
—for
my
sake!”

“Let us be quiet,” said the photographer.

“You see what you’ve done?” said Millie to her fiancé, “do you see?
Now
do you see what you’ve done?”

I. Small, taking himself by the ears and shaking himself, shouted: “I didn’t done nothing, I didn’t said a word! Let it be a boot and shoe shop, a shmoot and boo shop—for the sake of peace, anything!”

So at last it was decided that I. Small was to become a retailer of footwear. There were passionate arguments about suitable premises. The photographer suggested one of the expanding north-western suburbs. Millie took this as a slight. Having listened, nodding in agreement, until the photographer was gone, she foamed at the mouth with resentment….

So! Now she knew. She knew it all now. He was jealous already, that twopenny-halfpenny photographer—he wanted the West End of London all to himself, the glutton! So that was the kind of man he was: thank God she had found out at last! She tore a handkerchief and cried. So that was the idea, was it? To get them out of the way. Just because he talked good English, he was ashamed of his future brother-in-law. So that was it, was it? Who was
he
to be stuck up just because he was a photographer—all he had to do was put a bit of black cloth over his head and say: “Smile please,” or “Look at the dicky bird.” Him and his dicky birds—he looked down on her Intended because he was a high-class shoemaker, did he? What was the matter with a shoemaker, anyway? A high-class shoemaker was as good as a photographer any day, in fact twenty times better than certain photographers she could mention. In any case, I. Small was not a shoemaker—he was in ladies’ and gentlemen’s shoes…. But everybody wanted to get them out into the suburbs, that was it…. Millie carried on in this vein until her father drove his clenched fist into a soup tureen full of hot borsch and screamed like a maddened horse in a burning stable, saying: “I want you should be calm!”

In the end she set her heart on business premises with an upper part in a side street off Oxford Street. (The place the
photographer
had suggested was in Golders Green. He bought it himself, freehold, for £300 and sold it twenty years later for
£7,350—which made Millie’s blood boil again.) But at present, at least, she could say that her husband was in the ladies’ and gentlemen’s boot and shoe business in the heart of the West End. Mayfair! From Oxford Circus you turned westward, walked three hundred and fifty yards, turned left, walked four hundred yards, crossed the street, took the turning by the antique shop, and there was I. Small’s establishment, in Mayfair—a five minutes’ walk from Park Lane.

Charles Small, who has inherited a tendency to sit on tacks to give himself something to cry over, walked one evening to look at that shop in Noblett Street, W.1. Of all the streets in London this was the least frequented. It had no right to call itself a thoroughfare. There was no earthly reason why any human being should ever set foot in it. Noblett Street was an
unnecessary
street, a sort of dried-up fjord, ominously quiet. The motor horns in Oxford Street sounded half a mile and a hundred years away. It was the sort of street to which a misanthropic Londoner might retire in the twilight of his life, to brood in woolly silence, out of the sight of mankind. There he could walk up and down of an afternoon, and be certain that he would not encounter any living creature, except cats. To borrow an image of James Thurber’s, Noblett Street had cats as other places have mice—the cats knew that no one would disturb them here. They wooed their mates in the open road and had honeymoons in the doorways, while bloated, verminous pigeons cooed and strutted in the gutters with such smug self-satisfaction that you wanted to cuff their heads. Noblett Street was full of empty peace. It had had enough of life, and settled down to a well-earned rest—it could never have amounted to anything in any case. Once in a while an old beggar-woman who picked rags out of the dustbins and lived on potato peelings, kipper bones, the residual juice in salmon tins, and orange peel went there to relieve herself. In Noblett Street, even at high noon, she was assured of privacy. If there had been any people worth mentioning living in it, even if they had had nothing better to do than loaf on their thresholds, it would not have been so bad. But when Charles Small visited Noblett Street it was dead and derelict. There were only eight shops and outside seven of them hung agents’ boards saying
To
Let
or
For
Sale.
The only open shop was described as a “Pets’ Beauty Parlour”. He glanced inside and saw a lumpy-faced woman parting the hair of a petulant Yorkshire terrier—probably
her first customer in weeks, and a discontented one at that, to judge by the sound of its voice.

The houses on the other side of the street were being demolished to make room for a block of flats. Work was finished for the day, but a miasmatic haze of dirty dust still hung in the foul air over the ruins. The standing brickwork looked so rotten that Charles Small would not have been much surprised if someone told him that the workmen were pushing the houses down with their shoulders. Trust his mother to pick on a street like this—oh, trust her! Mayfair! He spat, partly in anger, and partly because his mouth was full of dust.

There was a gloomy little pub, “The Noblett Arms”, on the far corner. Charles Small’s curiosity was something like the gnawing hunger of a dyspeptic who must indulge his craving for sour pickles although he knows that there will be the devil to pay. He went into The
Private
Bar,
where an aged man looked up from last Sunday’s newspaper and stared, round-eyed with hope, until Charles Small ordered a shandy—a mixture of
ginger-beer
and mild ale that used to cost threepence. Obviously, the landlord, seeing a well-dressed gentleman, expected to get rid of at least tenpennyworth of brandy. Mowing and gibbering, and looking as if he was about to bite him, he squirted a little ale from a beer engine that creaked and groaned at being awakened out of a long sleep; wrung the neck of a ginger-beer bottle; filled the glass and pushed it across the bar with a snarl. Charles Small said: “Will you take something yourself?”

“Drop of brandy.”

Putting down a ten-shilling note he said: “Help yourself.”

“Haven’t you got nothing smaller? Where d’you suppose I’m going to get change? It’s one-and-four. Haven’t you got one-
and-four
?”

“Here’s one-and-four…. Is your clock right?”

“It wouldn’t be ’ere if it was,” said the publican.

“Have you been here long?”

“A bloody sight too long.”

“May I ask how long?”

“Thirty years. Thirty years too long.”

“Business good?”

“It looks like it, don’t it?”

“Well, good health!” said Charles Small, sipping his shandy, while the landlord snorted and swallowed his brandy…. “You
say you’ve been here thirty years. I wonder if, by any chance, you remember some people called … let me see … yes, Small, that’s it, Small, who used to have a shoe shop in this street?”

At this the muscles twitched in the landlord’s face—he was trying to smile, but he had lost the knack. While his face was twitching and quivering, he blew air through his nostrils; he was laughing. Then he said: “Shoe shop? I remember
them.
They came here and opened a shoe shop. They must have been off their heads. They didn’t last five minutes. They went broke in no time. That’s how it is with them Jews, here to-day, gone to-morrow. Give ’em an inch and they’ll take a yard. It’s your money they want. That’s how they rule the world. What’s the idea of a boot shop in Noblett Street? If you want my opinion, there was dirty work going on somewhere. Boot shop! I’m too old a bird to be caught with chaff. There was more in that than meets the eye, but I never got to the bottom of it….”

T
HEY
put the Noblett Street shop in order. Millie wanted it painted white. Why? Because white was a nice clean colour. The estate agent suggested varnished brown, grained to look like walnut. But Millie insisted that white was the only
respectable
paint. One speck of dust, on white paint, showed up like a fly in a glass of milk, so that if a woman kept the place clean (she looked sideways at Lily) there was no question about it. Who went in for brown paint? What sort of a colour was brown? White!

So the woodwork was painted white. The shop was fitted and stocked. The family called a secret conference and it was agreed that everyone should buy a pair of boots or shoes from the Smalls of Mayfair, if only to give them a little encouragement. Sisters, brothers-in-law, uncles and cousins came and bought boots, shoes, dancing pumps and slippers. Millie insisted on their paying no more than the wholesale price. It looked bad, she said, to make money out of your own flesh and blood. So they emptied eighteen shiny oblong boxes in the first week—at cost price. After that business fell flat. Millie, who had large ideas, and had conversed with people who had brains, knew something of the strategy of modern commerce. She said: “We must advertise!”

“What advertise? Where advertise?”

“What’s the use of talking? Oh, what’s the
use?
”

“Then don’t talk!”

“So now he wants to shut me up! What marvels have
you
done? … Advertise! For God’s sake, advertise!”

They bought six lines of space in a local newspaper. Nothing happened.

“Ha! A bargain we got!” said I. Small, angry but satisfied.

“Then send out circulars!”

“Who to?”

“What’s the use of talking if he’s ignorant?” cried Charles Small’s mother. (She and her husband had already acquired the habit of quarrelling in apostrophe.) “Send out letters. Who to, he says. Everybody!”

“Go on then, send out letters, send! To everybody send letters.
Na
—
Nadir
a pen,
nadir
a bottle ink—go on, to everybody write letters, quick! Tell them they should come at once, quick!”

“What’s the use of talking to him? He’s ignorant.”

“What does she mean, he’s ignorant?”

“You’re ignorant!”

“All right. Take the pen, take the ink, write letters to
everybody
. Go on, educated woman,
schreib!
Write!”

Yes, the business was a failure, and Millie was ashamed. They were in debt, and after the next quarter’s rent had been paid there would be less than two hundred pounds in the bank.

I. Small was bored because he had nothing to do. Noblett Street was too quiet. He missed the hammering and the grunting of the cobblers in the workshop. He was unhappy. So one day when somebody’s manservant came into the shop and asked him if he did repairs, he said: “Well, why not?”

“Well look, let you and me have an understanding. I work for a certain gentleman who’s got a whole lot of boots and shoes for repairs, do you see? Only it’s got to be first-rate work,
top-notch
first-rate, every stitch by hand—understand?”

“Every stitch by hend.”

“Now look: this is how it is: my gentleman’s stuff has been going to Trumpet’s for repair. Trumpet charges eight-and-six. I’ve come to an understanding here and there, see? So if you see eye to eye, you and me might come to an understanding for six-and-six.”

“Six-and-six?”

“All right, call it seven bob. I can put a whole lot of work in your way, only you understand, it’s not for love. If I bring you a receipt that I can make a few pence on, you sign it. That’s only fair, isn’t it? If you don’t think so, say so. Eh?”

“So what is it you’ve got you want I should do?”

“To start with, there’s eight pairs of boots and shoes. And I’ve got friends, see? I can make it worth your while, understand? Eh?”

“Bring ’em.”

I. Small went to the cellar and opened a packing-case in which he had nailed down his tools. But when he told his wife that he proposed to take in repairs, she had hysterics. At last she knew what he was, at last she knew the creature she had married! She had tried, oh God, she had tried so hard to drag
him out of the gutter—but now he wanted to go back to it, back and back, dragging her down and down into the mire! That was it. Had she but known. She had known it all along. She had been warned, more fool she, by her sisters. Now it would be necessary for her to admit that they were right and she was wrong. Such, indeed, was the truth. But to admit that truth—oh, shame, shame! Let the fact be faced: she was married to a dirty little cobbler. And there she was, and woe was she.

“Then what do you want I should do, what?”

“Be a man!
Do
something!”

“Do what? What do you want I should do? What? Say, speak, tell me what!”

“All right, go on, go and mend boots,” said Millie.

“So what am I doing?”

“That’s all you’re fit for. Go
on, mend boots. What’s the matter with you, what are you waiting for? Go on, mend boots!”

“You should have a good hiding! A good hiding you should have!” shouted I. Small.

“I’ll call a policeman!”

“Bah!”

There was an armistice, and it was arranged that I. Small should set up his last in the basement. If any member of the family popped in it was to be understood that he was hammering away to oblige a nobleman. She looked after the shop while he worked in the cellar, and so they managed to keep their muddled heads above water for a few months. Then she announced that she was pregnant.

Thinking of this, Charles Small shuts his eyes tight and pinches himself, because it seems too horrible. For many years, now, he has been trying to close his mind against the idea of having been begotten by his stupid father upon his stupid mother, and carried around for nine months in—of all things—of all unimaginable things—his mother’s womb. What business had she with a womb? As for how he got there, that is not to be thought of. When he remembers hearing his mother boast of the trouble she took to breast-feed him his weak, nervous stomach, turns over again. He heaves, he nauseates, his face becomes wet and cold. So he drinks a glass of water. The ostentatious silence of his hushed household gets on his nerves, and in his mouth, always, is that sickening taste of
sour milk.

*

Oh, what a liar, coward, bully and cheat his mother must have been! Truth wasn’t in the woman. She lived by false pretences. Every other word she said was uttered with intent to defraud. She was constantly endeavouring to create some convincing falsehood complimentary to herself. Everything she did and said was for the sake of appearance, and she really thought that her appearances were deceptive. Obviously she imagined that everyone was a bit of a fool. At the same time, she was ignorant and gullible as a Congo savage: she believed everything but the truth, and was influenced by everything but reason. There was no way of plumbing the abyss of her stupidity.

As soon as she knew that she was pregnant she behaved not like a woman with child, but like a woman possessed by a devil that had to be cast out. She went for advice, first of all, to her married sisters, who were as ignorant as she was and just as spiteful. They had all had children, without much difficulty, but had done their duty to their sex and glorified themselves in the process. Having heard from other lying wives that it is only natural for a pregnant woman to have strange fancies, they had had strange fancies. It was conveyed to Millie that the more strange fancies she had, the better; Sarah boasted that she had awakened at four o’clock in the morning with a craving for hot rolls and butter. Her husband, who was the best husband in the world, had got up immediately, run to a bake-house where men were working all night to turn out the next day’s bread, and bribed the foreman to let him take away half a dozen rolls so hot that you could hardly touch them.

Thereupon there was a controversy. Pearl, red with anger, asked Sarah what she meant by “best husband in the world”. When she was big with her little Arthur she woke up at one o’clock in the morning and said: “I fancy a pickled herring.” Now where was a pickled herring to be procured at one o’clock in the morning? Her husband jumped out of bed like a shot, ran half a mile, knocked at the door of a delicatessen shop until the proprietor came down and gave him pickled herrings. She laughed triumphantly.

At this Ruth sneered: “Didn’t he wait to put his trousers on?”

“Go on, make a mockery, just because a man has consideration. Did your husband get up at one o’clock in the morning to get you a
herring?”

“No, Pearly, no,” said Ruth, with a quiet smile. “He got home at one o’clock in the morning, from a big deal.”

“Ha-ha—big deal! Was she fair or dark?”

“I only wish that you and your husband should have such deals every day of your life, fair, dark or medium,” said Ruth, with dignity. “He was so tired he could hardly stand. He was so tired, he was too tired to eat. All he wanted was to sleep. All of a sudden what do I fancy? Cream-crackers with butter and strawberry jam. There isn’t a cream-cracker in the
neighbourhood
. But he gets up, goes out in his slippers, and comes back at three o’clock with cream-crackers. And may I never move from this chair, he was so tired he fell asleep with all his clothes on…. It’s no use talking, when you get a fancy, you get a fancy.”

But Lily, the unnatural creature, smiled smugly and said: “Very nice too. But when I was five months gone I woke up in the middle of the night and said to Nathan: ‘Nathan, I fancy a bit of gingerbread.’ Nathan sat up in bed and so he said: ‘You fancy a bit of gingerbread, Lily?’ I said: ‘In the cupboard, Nathan.’ So Nathan said: ‘If you fancy gingerbread, have
gingerbread
—go and get it out of the cupboard,’ he said, ‘my mother had twelve of us without fancying gingerbread.’ So I went back to sleep, and I didn’t fancy gingerbread any more. That’s how I like a man to be. Nathan’s a rock, a brick, a stone! Catch
my
Nathan running for
herrings
in the middle of the night!”

“Where there’s no sense there’s no feeling,” said Ruth.

“That’s what she calls a man!” cried Pearl.

“What’s the use of talking?” asked Sarah.

But I. Small was told that if the mother’s craving was not instantly satisfied the baby would be born deformed. Two days later, at five o’clock in the morning, Millie shook her husband and said: “I fancy hot rolls and butter.” He got up, groaning, and went out to find hot rolls. Then she wanted pickled herrings at one o’clock, salted herrings at three o’clock, red herrings at four o’clock, soused herrings at five o’clock, cream-crackers at two o’clock, water-biscuits at two-thirty, and gingerbread in the middle of the night. When I. Small came home with gingerbread, she pretended to be asleep. Millie had hoped that he would say: “Go and get it.” … Oh for a rock, a brick, a stone!

So, in the last six months of her pregnancy, she sucked down all the foolishness of her gossiping acquaintances—
gurgling drain that she was—
cloaca
maxima
of femine slops!

If one old fool said that she ought to eat for two now, Millie ate herself sick. If another said that if she ate too much she would make the baby too big, she starved herself. Someone said that bottled stout made milk, so she drank stout. Someone else said that if she drank stout the child would be a drunkard. She stopped drinking stout. Her nipples became swollen and sore. Aha—cancer! Her belly swelled. Wow—— something horrible, unbelievably horrible, was going to happen. I. Small was informed that she was about to be torn to pieces. She would have to be sewn up after having burst. It was all because men were selfish. Their own pleasures was all they thought of. They took their pleasure, and then their wives went
bang
and exploded in a shower of torn entrails, screaming in ineluctable torment, in the middle of a dancing ring of shrieking martyrs, all tugging and pounding and kicking and pulling and digging and dragging. … I. Small thought of Millie as a thoroughfare about to be taken apart with pickaxes, and he pulled out handfuls of his hair. Once, when she said: “Srul, quick! It’s kicking!” he screamed: “Murderer! I’ll break his bleddy neck!”

I wish
to
God
I’d
kicked
her
out
of
the
window,
thinks Charles Small.

But at last he managed to be born. His father ran up and down in an ecstasy of self-accusation, beating himself on the head and breast and calling himself by insulting names:
Lobbus!
Snot-rag, toe-rag, uncivilised madman, murderer, pisspot, cannibal, rotter, turd, bandit, loafer, bugger, beast!” He tried to tear off his ears. “Piddler, manure, cad, nogoodnik,
scheisspot,
foreigner,
lapatutnik,
nothing, fartnik!” He banged himself about the head. “Muck! …
Makkes!
…
Schlemazzel!
Rubbish, bastard!”

One of the women came to him and said: “It’s a boy.”

“Boy, boy! How’s Millie?”

“Please God she’ll be … I don’t know, please God.”

“Let me go up, let me go!”

“Wait yet!”

At last they let I. Small go upstairs. His wife was asleep. They showed him something like a lump of raw liver wrapped in cloth. “What d’you call this?” he asked.

“Ssh! Your son!”

“This?
A
son?”

“What then?”

I. Small looked at it with loathing. So that was how it was!
Millie’s insides
had
fallen out. There was some of her offal loosely wrapped in a towel, still pulsating. This was what came of being a beast.

(Millie, grudgingly yielding to his puppyish amorous advances with a tremendous affectation of disgust, had managed to make him feel horribly ashamed of himself. She somehow conveyed the impression that in
her
family there had been no sexual intercourse for many generations. Respectable people never even thought of such things. Pfoo!—filthy! … The hypocrite: she enjoyed nothing better than a prurient, sloppy love romance; she used to walk a mile and a half to a threepenny circulating library where she could pick a book off the shelf, so that she would not have to soil her lips by whispering the lewd, unmentionable name of Monsieur Paul de Kock.)