The Song of the Flea

by Gerald Kersh

  “Sorry?”

  “I’m sorry. There really isn’t much I can say about this. It’s no use to me. I have a room full of them up there in the front. I’ve got more of these than I know what to do with.”

  “But you’ve got all sorts of things, not half as good as this, that you’re charging ten, fifteen, twenty pounds for! You’ve got them in the window! Come and see!”

  “Yes, I know what I’ve got in the window. But stop to consider how long I might have had them in the window. Simply ask yourself what people want with snuff-boxes now, things being as they are.”

  “Do you seriously mean to say that you actually don’t want this?” cried Pym.

  “I don’t want it.”

  “Are you seriously telling me that it isn’t worth, for instance, a fiver?”

  The old man smiled and said: “My goodness gracious, no, indeed!”

  “What would it be worth to you, then?” asked Pym, in a flat voice, stroking the engraved lid of the box.

  “As things are now it’s hardly worth making an offer for. Twenty years ago, yes. In twenty years’ time, perhaps. I’ll give you a pound for it, if you like.”

  “What! A pound? If I wanted to, I could pawn it for more than that,” said Pym.

  “I don’t think you could.”

  Pym licked his lips and said: “The fact of the matter is this. There’s an old man, a very old man, very sick—cancer. He’s got cancer, inoperable cancer of the stomach. All he’s got left is his silver—antique silver, some marvellous stuff. He asked me to find a dealer. This box of his is, as you might say, a kind of sample. He’s got tons of it—plates, dishes, candlesticks, teapots … snuff-boxes … all kinds of silver. And he said to me: ‘My boy, I have got to sell my silver. It has come to this, and there’s no getting away from it. I’ve always heard that Mr. Szisco is a good man to deal with. You go and see what Mr. Szisco gives you for this snuff-box, and if what he gives you is fair, I’ll sell him the rest of my silver.’ So you see …”

  “A pound is all I can offer.”

  There was a little silence. The old man pushed the box back across the counter.

  “I’ll take the pound,” said Pym.

  “Would you rather have change?” said the old man, putting down a new pound note.

  “No thanks—it isn’t for me.”

  “Of course; I quite understand that. Good day to you.”

  Pym tried to slam the door behind him, but even in that he was frustrated by a patent pneumatic brake that seemed to laugh under its breath. He stood on the kerb and waited for the traffic to stand still, feeling as he had felt once before when, having stopped to pick up a halfpenny, he rose and broke his head on the edge of a marble mantelpiece … shocked to stupefaction, hopelessly vulnerable, unforgettably foolish. He could almost feel the trickle of blood creeping under the back of his collar, and the strain of the shamefaced grin under his cheekbones.

  “Easy now—easy does it,” said Pym, breathing deeply. Before he crossed the road he compelled himself to take hold of certain loose strings inside himself. He gripped hard and pulled. His loose, astonished mouth closed tight. Then he got a grip on the slack, empty part of his will and twisted it with all his might until he felt compact again—screwed down and reduced; knotty, taut and uncomfortable—clenched like a hand that becomes a fist to reassure itself that it is still all there.

  Hope, by God, was not lost! Nothing but a bubble was broken! The morning was not gone, and he had more than twenty-one shillings in his pocket. Pym walked resolutely northward, but he paused outside a respectable pawnshop near the Hampstead Road, and glanced at the display in the window. No more dreams! He walked right in.

  “You have a cigarette-case in the window marked three pounds ten shillings,” he said.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Look: I’ve got one exactly like that, but a good deal heavier, at home. If I wanted to sell it, how much would you give me for it?”

  “Oh, well,” said the pawnbroker. “I mean to say … how could I say without seeing it?”

  “Listen: say it was just like the one you’ve got in the window, and in perfect condition, and I wanted to sell it—not pawn it, sell it—could you give me an idea of what you’d give for it?”

  “Hard to say without seeing the case. Could be worth thirty shillings or a couple of quid. Depends on the weight and quality of the article, doesn’t it?”

  “I suppose so. But say my case——”

  “You bring it along,” said the pawnbroker. Then his face changed and his body swelled. He began to quiver. “Circumstances alter cases,” he said, bursting into a long laugh.

  “I want to get this right, you see,” said Pym. “You’d give up to two pounds for a cigarette-case exactly like that bevelled-edge one in the window?”

  “It depends, you see. Circumstances alter cigarette-cases.—Hwa-hwa-hwa-hwa-hwooo!” The pawnbroker controlled himself. “A good modern bevel-edge case like the one in the window, in perfect condition, I’d pay up to a couple of pounds for. But circumstances——”

  “I’ll bring mine along.”

  “Yes, you do that.”

  Ignoring the ache in his legs and the heavy emptiness of his stomach, Pym walked to Islington and redeemed his cigarette-case from Messrs. McCormick Ltd. He paused only to visit a public lavatory, where he filled one of his pockets with thin paper. He had a little more than six shillings now. His head was rattling like a stale walnut, and in his throat there was something like a hangman’s knot.

  “Well?” he said to the pawnbroker near the Hampstead Road.

  “It’s a nice case all right. But I mean to say—look.”

  “What d’you mean—‘look’? What’s the matter with it? Look at what? Why look, in that tone of voice?”

  “Well, look—J. P.”

  “What’s the matter with J. P.? That’s my initials.”

  “I daresay. Well, there you are. That’s just it.”

  “That’s just what?”

  “Well, who wants a case with somebody else’s initials?”

  “You said——”

  “I said nothing about initials. You were talking about a case in perfect condition. You never mentioned initials.”

  Licking dry lips with a glutinous tongue, Pym said: “They can be taken off.”

  “Spoil the case,” said the pawnbroker.

  Pym swallowed air. “How much for it?” he said.

  “You want to sell it, do you?”

  “Those initials aren’t cut deep—they’re only sort of scratched on.”

  “I could let you have a pound.”

  “I want two pounds.”

  “Well, I daresay you can get it elsewhere. Not me, sir.”

  Pym struck out SOS in Morse code with a knuckle on the glass counter. “Thirty shillings,” he said.

  “I’ll make it twenty-two-and-six. Twenty-two shillings and sixpence is my last word.”

  “Oh, all right, all right—give me twenty-two-and-six.”

  “It would have been worth a couple of pounds if it wasn’t for the initials,” said the pawnbroker, counting out the money.

  “One of these days those initials will be worth more than the case,” said Pym, through his teeth.

  “But at the present moment——”

  Pym began to say something, thought better of it, and left the shop. Now he had twenty-eight shillings and sixpence in his fob-pocket, and some copper coins in the right-hand pocket of his trousers.

  CHAPTER THREE

  DETERMINED, now, to see the end of the matter, Pym went to another pawnshop and redeemed his summer suit and winter overcoat. He had not known that the old leather suitcase was so heavy. After twenty paces the strength ran out of his right arm, so that he had to stop. A rough seam in the handle cut a groove in his left hand. He changed hands again and again. At last he balanced the suitcase on his shoulder, where it nuzzled its way in again and hurt abominably. Pym put it down, took in a reserve of breath, and transfer
red it to the other shoulder; but his face was dripping with sweat and his handkerchief was out of reach of his left hand—and already sodden, in any case.

  Nevertheless he reached Proust’s secondhand gentlemen’s wardrobe shop in High Street, St. Giles’, at a quarter to two in the afternoon, and walked in, stopping only to wipe his face on his sleeve and adjust his tie.

  Pym hoped for nothing, and had no fear. Three shillings and a thin sixpence tinkled in his fob-pocket. He threw down the suitcase—his last chip—and said, quite calmly:

  “Want to buy this stuff?”

  The man behind the counter shook out the overcoat and spread out the suit. If he says ‘Fivepence’, I’ll take fivepence, Pym said to himself. I shall have done all I could.

  “Did you want to sell the case, too?” the man asked.

  “Of course. The case, too.”

  Pym did not care. He opened his nostrils and sniffed the heavy odours of the secondhand clothes shop. There was a lingering smell of steam that had passed through tired trousers; a sour whiff of dry-cleaning; a tang of benzine, boot-polish, wax, perspiration, dead flowers, and tobacco.

  “Hm!” said the man behind the counter. “Well, well! If you like I can let you have forty-five shillings for the lot.”

  “Forty-five shillings?” said Pym, stupefied.

  “You see, the case isn’t much good to me. Well, look here, call it forty-seven-and-six.”

  Pym picked up the pound note, two ten-shilling notes, and three half-crowns. He felt weak and tearful, limp yet light, blissfully drowsy, like a woman after a sharp travail. He had fifty-one shillings. How wise he had been to ask for a loan of only twenty-five shillings on the typewriter; how prudent, how far-sighed! If he had been a fool who lived for the moment, like certain others he could name, he would have borrowed all he could get—three pounds, perhaps—and then where would he be? Now he could get back the machine, pay his rent, and had a bed to sleep in, a table to work on, a fine typewriter to work with, and something to eat. What more could a man desire? He had sold his last good suit and his overcoat, his only pair of decent shoes, and his presentable leather suitcase—a good twenty pounds’ worth—for forty-seven-and-six. What did that matter? ‘With my typewriter I can turn a sheet of toilet paper into a five-pound note,’ he said to himself. Hungry but exhilarated, curiously peaceful in spite of his sore feet and aching arms, he rode in a bus to Greenberg’s, near the Gray’s Inn Road, and got the typewriter. Pym could not wait until he was at home: he went to a café and, balancing the machine on his knees, took off the cover. It was good to look at—a big American portable with all the most recent devices, carefully tended, better than new. It had a tabular key, an asterisk, and plus and equal signs in case you wanted to type arithmetic. Pym could see his face in the gleaming black enamel. Looking lovingly into his own eyes he touched one of the keys. Instantly up leapt the letter ‘a’ and the platen received the imprint of it and then moved one space to the left. Here was perfection, absolute beauty, brightly bedecked with a red-and-black ribbon—efficiency wearing the colours of Anarchy.

  Pym marvelled at the kindly considerate competence of pawnbrokers who treated strangers’ goods with such loving care. Lend your typewriter to a friend and it comes back broken, or full of fluff and candle-grease: lend it to a pawnbroker and he treats it as if it were his own.

  When Pym left the teashop he did not carry the typewriter by the handle: he held it warmly under his right arm.

  Busto came up from the basement as soon as Pym’s key rattled in the lock.

  “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  Busto touched the palm of his right hand with the forefinger of his left and said: “Hah?”

  “Eh? Oh! Oh yes, yes, of course—the rent, the rent—I clean forgot. It slipped out of my mind.”

  “Sure—it slip out of your mind, and you slip out of my house. Well? You gonna lolly?”

  “Let me see,” said Pym. “I owe you eleven shillings, I think. Rent payable in advance, if I remember rightly. Here it is.”

  Busto’s curved thumb and forefinger snapped like the beak of a parrot; in their grip Pym’s two ten-shilling notes resembled a bedraggled paper tulip. “I got no change,” he said.

  “Hold it for me,” said Pym, “and then I’ll only owe you two shillings for the next week.”

  “Well, okay,” said Busto, gloomily. He dragged a bunch of keys out of his pocket, led the way upstairs, and unlocked Pym’s door.

  Without pausing to take off his hat Pym uncovered the sleek, gleaming black typewriter and played with it for a little while. He worked the tabular key, the back-spacer, and the shift lock: voluptuously inserted a sheet of paper and typed The quick brown fox jumped right over the sly lazy dog and made a row of figures and punctuation marks. A cracked saucer in the cupboard was still greasy with the rancid traces of a bit of butter. Pym gathered them on a forefinger and anointed the groove along which the platen ran. Now, when he touched the space-bar, the machine seemed to purr like a well-fed black cat.

  Then, as he stood back smiling and looking down at it, automatically licking his finger, he tasted the butter and remembered that he was very hungry. Pym smiled again: now he could smile at hunger, for he had five shillings and sixpence in silver. Half a crown of this he hid under one of the stacks of typescript, and then he went out again, locking the door and testing it twice—not before he had dusted the enamelled surfaces of the typewriter with one of the ends of his necktie.

  *

  The publicans, butchers, milkmen and grocers of the neighbourhood seldom gave credit to Busto’s tenants, who were sure to be gone to-morrow. Even the newsagents waited to see the colour of a penny before parting with a daily paper.

  Pym stopped at the shop of Dai Davies, a dairyman who carried attractive sidelines of wrapped bread, canned food, tea and little cakes. Dai Davies, who went to bed at midnight and got up at three, looked like an old horse in a homespun jacket and a tweed cap; but his wife and daughters were scoured and starched, white from hairline to hem—quick women with lidless black eyes, who crackled with cleanliness. Pym ordered half a pint of milk, a two-ounce packet of tea at two-and-eight a pound, a soft white two-pound loaf of bread in a wax envelope, and half a pound of Cheddar cheese at eightpence a pound. While Mrs. Davies darted from shelf to shelf, Pym gnawed a thumbnail and stood vacillating, rocking from heels to toes, reading the labels on the tin cans. One label attracted him more than all the rest put together—a coloured photograph of strawberries.

  “How much are these strawberries?”

  “One-and-ten.”

  Pym turned on his heel and looked at the peaches, the pineapple, the loganberries and the pears. He wanted strawberries now, more than anything in the world. Two or three minutes passed: Dai looked at Blodwen, Blodwen exchanged glances with Gwen, and they all watched Pym. He knew that strawberries were not to be thought of. For the price of one tin of strawberries he could buy two pounds of cheese and still have fivepence for bread and twopence for gas. A hot wetness, which he had to swallow, came up from under his tongue. One-and-tenpence would buy him cooked meat, liver sausage, brawn, veal-and-ham pie, herrings, salami—anything he liked in the delicatessen shop two streets away. He could buy a fillet steak, or seven pounds of potatoes; or some cigarettes and an inexhaustible quantity of lentils, split peas, or rice. He could buy cabbages, carrots, onions, and Saturday night trimmings of meat, and make a magnificent stew. He could buy a few Portuguese sardines, a quantity of Norwegain brisling, or several tins of herrings in tomato sauce. Who but a madman would buy tinned strawberries for one-and-ten?

  He sucked his mouth dry, went to the counter, put down his money and picked up his parcel. Blodwen rang the cash register and scraped up the change.

  “How much are strawberries?” said Pym, making conversation.

  “Strawberries are one-and-ten, strawberries.”

  “You have only large tins, I suppose?”

  “Yes, only large tins there is.�
��

  “Give me a tin of strawberries.”

  Back in his room Pym cursed bitterly: he had a blunt knife with an ivorine handle, a steel knife with a black handle, one heavy fork marked with the name of a restaurant, one nickel-plated fork with uncertain prongs, two spoons, a rusty tea-strainer, and a wooden handle that had belonged to an ice-pick.

  There was no tin-opener.

  He went out to eat in a restaurant.

  Pym was angry with himself. Strawberries were symbolic of all the folly in the world; he hated strawberries. In all his life Pym had never felt quite so disgusted and unhappy.

  On his way to the Escurial Palace Restaurant in Charlotte Street, where anyone could buy a dish of spaghetti for ninepence, Pym began to cross-examine himself. What had he done? What did he mean to do, and with what motives? Where had he been all his life? What right had he to strut with peacock feathers in his hair while his toes were sticking out of his boots—to swagger from pawnshop to rag-and-bone shop and so, cock-a-hoop, to a hash joint?—he, with his one-and-tenpenny tin of strawberries, and no tin-opener! Who was he, what was he? He had sold his birthright for a typewriter and some clothes, pledged everything for a tin of salmon and a week in a dirty bed; and exchanged the clothes for the typewriter, another week in the same bed, and a tin of strawberries which he couldn’t even open. He was nothing. He was lost.

  Near Warren Street someone called him by his name. He stopped and exclaimed: “Why, Win!”

  “Johnny!” cried the girl called Win. “My God, Johnny!—This is a sort of an act of Providence’”

  “It’s nice to see you again, Win.”

  “I don’t suppose you really mean it, but you’ll never know how nice it is for me to see you again, Johnny. You’ve got thin: what have you been doing with yourself?”

  “Oh … this and that. What’ve you been doing with yourself?”

  “Don’t let’s go into that just now, Johnny. How is the book going?”

  “It goes, it goes. How’s Ted?”

  “Well, I suppose he’s all right. As a matter of fact, I don’t really know.”