The Song of the Flea

by Gerald Kersh

But Reason, punch-drunk and almost blind with blood, came back again to close with the Shadow, while the bell of a church struck one, like a gong.

  “Snap out of it! What about Proudfoot? Go to Proudfoot.”

  Pym writhed out of the narrow street like a dog struggling through a hole in a wall and found himself in the Strand. The road glistened in the lamplight by the dark and dreadful gates of the Tivoli. A swollen sky sagged under an infinite weight of water: everything was stretched tight, shining with tension—in one moment the road would burst like a black bladder and the sky would split like a sail and darkness and wind and rain and light would rush together in seething chaos.

  A taxi, coming out of Bedford Street, swung eastward. Pym ran towards it, shouting.

  “Where d’you want to go?” the driver asked.

  Something grey and woolly was packed between Pym and what he wanted to say. He found a couple of syllables, hard and sharp, like seeds in raw cotton, and said: “Proudfoot.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  Pym’s groping fist caught hold of a cold metal lever. “God give me strength,” he prayed and put out all his force, because upon the turning of this lever the fate of the world depended. Something clicked and the lever was down—but it was nothing but the handle of the taxi door.

  “Emerson Square—yes, Emerson Square,” said Pym.

  He threw himself back on the ice-cold leather cushions. Grey streets, blotched and stippled with yellow light, curled and swirled away.

  “Number?”

  Pym’s rattling brain bounced and spun like a marble on a roulette wheel and came to rest. “Ten,” he said, holding his breath like a gambler who has staked all he has upon one single number.

  The taxi stopped.

  Pym pressed his thumb on a bell-push and held it there. A window opened and a woman said something in an angry voice. Slippered feet slapped and shuffled in the passage. A man’s voice, curiously tense and alert even at that small hour of the morning, said: “Who’s that?”

  “Oh, Proudfoot, Proudfoot, it’s me—John Pym! Please let me in, quickly—Oh, please let me in!”

  The door opened.

  “Come in quickly. Don’t stand there crying. Quick—I’m cold. Come in, come in. What the devil do you want at this time of night?”

  “I don’t know … I don’t know. I’m sorry … I don’t know. I don’t know what I want—I don’t know what to do. I don’t know! Don’t you understand?—I don’t know!”

  “Oh, I see. I think I understand. Come in and sit down.”

  “I knew you’d understand, Proudfoot. I knew you would. You understand everything,” said Pym.

  “Come in and shut the door.”

  *

  In his day Proudfoot had been worshipped and feared by an obsequious rabble of pickpockets, pimps, whores, card-sharpers, abortionists and burglars. They called him The Mouthpiece. He was supposed to be the most brilliant criminal lawyer on this side of the Atlantic. He could prove that black was white, hypnotise juries, and in cross-examination make such fools of witnesses that they did not know where to hide their heads. He had been notorious for his unscrupulousness and his terrifying audacity. When a case seemed hopeless Proudfoot The Mouthpiece thundered down upon the prosecution like a wounded buffalo, and smashed through; or he could weep like an innocent child; or be silent until he pounced like a cat. He was bold, shameless, irresistibly seductive. Someone drew a caricature of Proudfoot, repulsively ugly, lifting the skirts of blind Justice upon a sofa, with the caption: What does she see in him?

  His daring was phenomenal. For example: he whisked the infamous Silver Jack Stutz away from the gallows by reciting a formidable list of the man’s previous convictions, and thus managed to convince the jury that they were prejudiced against him. Proudfoot had gigantically magnified and coloured a microscopic speck of doubt in the evidence—having buzzed about the heads of the witnesses like a cloud of mosquitoes, harassing them to the edge of madness. Silver Jack, who had split his mistress from head to waist with a butcher’s cleaver, was acquitted.

  After that Proudfoot might have grown very great. But he was not strong enough. He could hold up the falling sky over the head of a bandit or wrestle with Death for the body of a murderer, but he could not carry the weight of success. The card-sharpers, share-pushers and con-men caught Proudfoot in the end—they flattered and adored him into over-estimating his might. They sold him a gold brick—a belief in his infallibility. Yes, in a little while they talked him into staking everything he had on one throw. For Proudfoot had become a god, and a god must be what his worshippers want him to be. The god of vengeance must drip blood; the god of love must be gentle and loving; the god of thieves must laugh at the law, especially if he is a lawyer. Proudfoot embezzled money and bribed a witness. (He could get away with anything.) By then he had taken to heavy drinking; and since women loved him for his success, and a god may do anything he likes except disappoint his worshippers, Proudfoot worked all day and played all night.

  On the day of reckoning the virtue went out of Proudfoot. He was defending himself against Dekker. The court was crowded. The public held its breath in anticipation of an historic rapier-and-dagger duel. They were disappointed. Proudfoot went down squirming and gasping, and there was the end of him. When he came out of prison only a column-inch or two in the newspapers announced the fact, and no one was interested, although headlines on the front pages had announced his going in. He loitered about Fleet Street on his way down along the gutters. Sometimes he was seen in the crypt of the Law Courts, lead-grey and heavy, noticeably aged. He had strutted like a bantam cock in his heyday: now he waddled like an old duck, all belly and backside. Sometimes he staggered a little: this meant that he had got hold of a pound or two. He contrived to live, in one shady way or another.

  How otherwise can a disbarred barrister live? If he decides to go straight, having found that crime, detected, does not pay, he can do little jobs of clerking in a practising lawyer’s office—provided he can find an unbroken lawyer who will trust him or pity him enough. But that kind of honest bread is gritty to bite and bitter to swallow. He can try his hand at salesmanship, dragging a case of samples from door to door. But he has not the knack of selling things. There is no law that compels a shopkeeper to listen to him; no judge to say: “You must not interrupt.”

  At last the broken barrister has a go at journalism, and so he finds himself in the company of many other professional gentlemen rather the worse for wear—ex-doctors whose pockets bulge with rejected articles on health and first-aid; ex-accountants who have committed to paper astonishing facts about income tax, which every editor in England has seen before; unfrocked clergymen bulging with essays on Resignation, or Christmas poems; struck-off solicitors with dog-eared analyses of the laws pertaining to Compensation; ex-actors who want to write about the Drama. In this wistful, well-spoken, confident-voiced, worried-eyed, important-chested, shiny-trousered half-world he meets, also, ex-burglars who are prepared to spill the beans; ex-bucket-shopkeepers willing to tell inside stories; old lags from Dartmoor and ex-prisoners from Devil’s Island who have hair-raising tales of incarceration. This is the ex-World of simple equations: of familiar symbols posing as unknown quantities.

  Sometimes the disbarred barrister has some brushing lip-to-ear contact with a questionable private-detective agency in one of the back-doubles near Holborn. Sometimes he acts as freelance consultant to worried, whispering women and pale, secretive men in the drinking clubs of Lisle Street and Gerrard Street and the coffee shops off the Charing Cross Road. Sometimes he may be seen urgently talking behind his hand to another ex-professional man near the Mansion House. Again, he may be in conference with white-handed members of the lumpen-proletariat in a bar near Bow Street. He survives. And every week or so, sure as fate, he squeezes his wine-red or lead-grey face into the pigeon-hole of the porter’s box in a newspaper office and asks to see “someone in authority on a matter of considerable importance”. (He has had anoth
er inspiration—probably something to do with your legal position if you trip over a bucket of dirty water and cut your knee.) Each time he appears a shade greyer, or redder; a little more seedy about the cuffs, and a little less firm-handed when he fills in the form that required him to state his name and his business.

  One muddy morning, or sweltering afternoon, the porter as good as tells him to go away and stay away. He goes. He is EX——.

  X = O.

  Proudfoot described himself now as a Journalist: his name was not quite forgotten in Fleet Street. After his crash the Sunday Special had published Proudfoot’s life-story: Master Mouthpiece! Once in a blue moon they printed a few of his paragraphs. He was a ruined man—a damp firework, spasmodically promising brilliant things; emitting nothing but pungent smoke and rocking to a disappointing standstill. Yet within the sodden coils of the man something smouldered until it touched a dry patch. Then Proudfoot blazed with coloured sparks and twirled again—for two seconds, after which he rocked suggestively in a cloud of promise, and was dead again. He was drunkenly spinning but still sparkling when Pym first said: “How d’you do?” to him in the lower waiting-room of the Sunday Special building. Pym, also, had sold an article. They exchanged courtesies, drinks, expressions of esteem; and became friends.

  *

  Pym sat in Proudfoot’s broken-bottomed easy-chair by the gas-fire, sniffing up the beginnings of explanations, sighing out the hiccup-broken fragments of apologies, and trying to swallow his shame.

  “You can stop that,” said Proudfoot.

  “I … I ha-beg …”

  “I said you can stop that! Come on, now; take a sip of water, Pym. Or will you have it in your face? Sip it, I said—sip, sip! Not gulp—sip, man! Sip it slowly and swallow the water, not the air. You must do as I say.”

  “I will, Proudfoot, I will.”

  When Proudfoot smiled his mouth looked like the sticky imprint of a gross kiss on a pewter tankard. He smiled now, remembering old times: the days of his godhead when people wept before him in the big soundproof office near Jockey’s Fields. “Lord, what shall we do to be saved?” they had asked; and he had always stood as he was standing now, with his hands clasped behind him smiling moistly with loose-mouthed scorn.

  “Yes, you will, Pym. And first of all you must be calm. If you are not calm,” said Proudfoot, separating his words and lingering on them a little, pressing them home like so many impressions of a rubber stamp, “if you are not calm I shall refuse to talk to you. I shall tell you to go away and come back another time when you are calm.”

  “I’m better now, Proudfoot. I can’t tell you how ashamed I am.”

  “Forget that. Tell me, what’s on your mind? I shall understand. Talk; get it off your chest.”

  Pym hesitated. He was confused. “I don’t quite know,” he said; “all of a sudden … snap—just like that—I felt I was going crazy. I don’t know what was the matter with me. It happened—just like that. I felt … I can’t describe it … that I was in danger, and people were after me. And I wanted to run away and hide. I didn’t want to go home because—it seems ridiculous—I was afraid to be alone; and I didn’t dare to go to a café or any such place because I was afraid to be with strangers. I knew I should do something silly. So I roamed about, and it got worse and worse, and then, just when I thought I really was going stark staring mad I thought of you. I came here in a taxi. Proudfoot, for God’s sake, what’s the matter with me? Am I really going crazy?”

  “I said be calm, Pym. You are not crazy. Relax now, and get things straight and tidy in your muddled head. Think hard and think carefully … Now tell me one single thing of which you have reasonable cause to be afraid.”

  Pym thought and shook his head.

  Proudfoot went on: “You were afraid of going to prison, were you not?”

  “Well, yes; but——”

  “There was no likelihood of that, as I told you when I found bail for you. You were in a highly nervous state at the time, yet you will not have forgotten that I tried to reassure you then.”

  “I’ll never forget all you’ve done for me, Proudfoot, as long as I live.”

  “Never mind that. You did not believe me, on that occasion, when I assured you that there was not one chance in a thousand of your being found guilty of compounding the felony. You did not believe me, did you, Pym?”

  “It wasn’t exactly that I didn’t believe you, Proudfoot; but was worked up—overwound—and fed up, fed up to the teeth.”

  “You did not believe me. Yet events proved me right. Did they or did they not?”

  “My God, yes, Proudfoot! I can’t tell you how grateful——”

  “You will believe me in future, perhaps? You will have a little more confidence in me?”

  “I have, Proudfoot—on my word of honour, I have confidence in you.”

  “That is all I want to know. Now it is established that your fears were groundless even when there appeared to be some material basis for them. Is that so?”

  “You’re absolutely right, Proudfoot.”

  “And the other fears that sent you—you—running like a rabbit through the streets to cry on my shoulder at two o’clock in the morning: they were nothing at all. They were not even figments of your imagination, were they? They had no form, even in your imagination, had they?”

  “No,” said Pym. “And I can’t tell you how——”

  “So, Mr. John Pym,” said Proudfoot, counting the points on the fingers of his left hand, “knowing that there is nothing to fear, you are afraid. You admit that you are frightened literally by Nothing. It is not like you to be afraid—even of Something, I believe?”

  “I suppose not.”

  “So you were not yourself, eh?”

  “It wasn’t like me, I admit. I’m terribly ashamed of myself.”

  “Excuse me: you are not ashamed of yourself: you are ashamed because you were not yourself. You are ashamed of having lost your grip upon yourself. But, my dear fellow,” said Proudfoot, trying to bring back into his hoarse voice a little of the old magic, “my dear fellow, no man’s strength is illimitable. You said that you were fed up—fed up to the teeth. It must have been a very tremendous combination of forces indeed that could break your hold on yourself! Consider, my dear Pym—look at yourself. You are young, you are healthy, you are handsome, you are strong; you have a charming personality and—above all, above all, Pym—you have genius. You are going to be great, a great author. You have told me so, and I believe you. And mark my words, Pym, it is impossible to be what I have been without a knack of weighing and measuring men. Oh, you may look at me as I am now, and laugh at the dirty old bum in the stinking old room, wearing a ragged old overcoat for a dressing-gown—you may laugh, Pym, and probably do laugh at me when you are far enough round the corner not to hurt my feelings——”

  “—I’d never dream——”

  “—But there are three or four large volumes of newspaper cuttings over there in which you may find certain evidence of certain qualities, certain faculties, and certain powers of assessment with which God has endowed this same out-at-elbows laughing-stock of Fleet Street,” said Proudfoot. “And I can tell you that although I have fallen low, I still know how to measure and assess a man. And I know you, Pym, to be potentially great. Don’t shake your head at me—you know it yourself, and you know that you know it. Otherwise—if you had not the genius’s faith in himself—would you have suffered as you have suffered merely for the sake of writing a book?”

  “I really have been trying to write a good book,” said Pym, pulling a loose horsehair out of the arm of the chair.

  “Living on coffee and rolls in dirty coffee shops, sleeping in lousy lodging houses, washing your own shirt in a basin overnight and putting it on damp in the morning, re-rolling your own cigarette ends half a dozen times, never having a penny to bless yourself with—when you might quite easily be rich and comfortable? It’s true that many second-rate artists have lived like that, but only because th
ey were lazy and liked hard liquor and easy women. You are not like that. No, a man’s destiny is written on his face if you know how to read it. I know how to read men, and that, more than anything else, made me what I used to be when they called me The Mouthpiece. Oh, I know what you’re thinking! You’re thinking: here is a fine one to talk—this flabby failure in a dirty overcoat, wearing old shoes on his bare feet because he hasn’t got slippers, and unable to offer a friend anything better than a sip of cold water out of a jug! That’s what you’re thinking. Still, I tell you that I’m right! There was only one man whom I couldn’t read. That man was my downfall.”

  Proudfoot paused, waiting for it. It came.

  “Who was he?” asked Pym.

  “Myself,” said Proudfoot, pointing to his four fat books of press cuttings, and watching Pym’s face.

  It was a strange face, blunt-featured, compact and muscular; a well-constructed, useful-looking face, handsome in spite of the short blunt nose and the out-thrust jaw. Pym’s mouth was set, now, in an expression of unshakable resolution and his eyes were steady under his frowning brows. Now he looked as a boxer looks when he shuts his ears to the thunder of the crowd and climbs through the ropes. Yes, Proudfoot had seen Pym’s face tightening and hardening while he talked. Ten minutes ago it had been the tear-stained face of a lost child. Now it was the formidable face of an undefeated fighter. The big bony hands, which had been plucking nervously at the loose horse-hair on the arm of the ragged easy chair, had closed slowly into hard knuckly fists.

  Proudfoot smiled. He was pleased. He liked this young man, whom he could pull together like a jointed doll at the end of a string. There Pym had sat, blubbering like a schoolboy and pleading with his wet eyes like a spaniel whose master has left him at home. And he, Proudfoot The Mouthpiece, with his magic mouth had whispered the Word and made a new man. Proudfoot the god had breathed a breath of life into this tear-softened clay. He had stretched out His Hand over the Chaos that was Pym, and lo! the light was separated from the dark, the earth was separated from the waters, the sun and the moon and the planets had clicked into their pockets in the sky, the things that swam and the things that crawled and the things that walked were in their ordained places, and in the broken chair by the gas-fire sat Man! Proudfoot drew a deep breath, so deep that his bronchitic old chest sang like a kettle. He was still in his heaven; a little advanced in years, somewhat tarnished about the aureole, and a shade flyblown on the surface. But He was still strong to save men from the perils and dangers of the night, and be with them in the Valley of the Shadow; He was still the Rock of the Salvation of them that walk in darkness.