The Song of the Flea

by Gerald Kersh

  “’It ’im in the guts!” cried the barman, dancing in ecstasy. “Kick ’im in the trollybobs!”

  “Mind your own bloody business!” said the fruit-salesman. “Slosh ’im in the bleeding teeth!”

  “Watch them nails!” said a porter.

  Pym ran in as the batten came down, caught Nat’s wrist in his left hand and butted him in the face. The batten clattered on the paving-stones. “Sticks, eh?” said Pym, still gripping Nat’s wrist; and hit him a tremendous blow on the side of the jaw. This time, as Nat fell, Pym threw himself upon him, buried his fingers in his white muffler, and knocked his head on the edge of the kerb. Nat snorted, and was still.

  “That’ll teach people to hit women,” said Pym.

  Then the little woman went mad. She foamed at the mouth and shrieked: “’Itting people when they’re down, you dirty, rotten stinker! You bloody, dirty, filthy-rotten stinking twanking bastard!” She buried her fingernails in Pym’s face, reaching for his eyes. “They won’t let you live! You leave my Nat alone! You leave my Nat alone!”

  “Lil’s worse than what ’e is,” said the porter to Proudfoot.

  “Madam——” said Pym, holding her wrists.

  “Don’t give me none of your ‘Madam’.

  “What’s all this?” said a policeman.

  The salesman lit a cigarette. The barman went back into the Jackdaw of Rheims. The porter looked at the sky and the other spectators made polite conversation.

  “You mind your own,” said Lil, picking at a broken fingernail.

  “Friendly bout,” said Nat, brushing horse dung and cabbage leaves off his neck.

  “I know all about your friendly bouts,” said the policeman. “Break it up, will you?”

  “That’s right,” said the porter.

  “Don’t you put your oar in, Mike,” said the policeman. “I know you.”

  “I assure you that everything is perfectly in order,” said Proudfoot.

  “Well, well! You, eh? How are you?”

  “Bearing up, bearing up, officer. There’s nothing to detain you here, I assure you.”

  The policeman walked heavily towards Wellington Street. Nat the Terror offered Pym a hand like a boiled crab and said: “A fair fight and no favour. All right? Clean battle well fought. All right? Eh? No ’ard feeling. Shake ’ands and come out fighting and may the best man win. All right?”

  “I’m afraid I lost my temper,” said Pym.

  “That’s all right. Afraid I lost my temper.”

  “You call yourself a man?” cried Lil. “You tuppenny-ha’penny twirp—you stinkpot, you, you dirty-filthy-rotten shite! You——”

  Nat, who had been watching big slow drops of blood falling from his nose into the cupped palm of his right hand, as the representative of a defeated Power might watch melted sealing-wax dropping on to the parchment of a treaty, said: “Was you told to poke your nose in? If I told you once I told you a million times to stuff a sock in it and shut your gash!” He slapped her face with his left hand, so hard that she fell on her back in the road.

  The spectators were talking.

  “Wot a left!” said the porter.

  “O-oo, that right!” said the salesman.

  “Biff-Bosh! One, two, three—Biff, biff, bosh, bosh, bash, bang!” said one of the spectators, bobbing and weaving and striking the air. “—’Fight fair!’—‘I won’t fight fair’—‘Yes, you will’—‘No, I won’t’—‘Yes, you bloody will!’—‘No, I bloody won’t!’ — Biff-bosh-bash-bosh-crash-slosh-smash-bong-clonk-bang!”

  “‘Did you address that remark to me? Then take that’—biff, bang, wallop!” said another porter. “Smashetty-bang. Up ’e gits. ‘Now I’ll do yer, bloody-blimey if I don’t do yer.’ ‘Ai swear bai mai mother’s laife Ai’ll bloody do yer.’ ‘Try it ’n see: ’ave a go—yer mother won’t know’, says Nat. And—slosh, bang, biff; biff-bang-bosh—and skwollop! Spark out.”

  Nat was saying to Pym: “One thing I like, and that’s a nice clean fight. What d’you want to sort me out for?”

  “You shouldn’t have struck the lady,” said Pym.

  “It ain’t etiquette, is it?” said a porter.

  Lil, having straightened herself, foot by foot like a carpenter’s measure, threw a handful of garbage into Nat’s face, screaming: “Man? You a man? You’re a dirty-filthy-rotten Woman! You dirty Woman! Slosh, don’t bloody talk!”

  “I beg your pardon; did you call me a woman?” said Nat, and knocked her down again.

  “Come away,” said Proudfoot. “Let us go elsewhere.”

  “By all means,” said Pym.

  “Are you hurt?”

  “Only my nose: I think it’s broken.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “Never better, oddly enough.”

  “What, in God’s name, made you pick a fight with Nat the Terror?”

  “I simply couldn’t stand by and see him hit the lady, Proudfoot.”

  “‘Lady!’ They call her Spitting Lil.”

  “Well, the woman, then.”

  “The trouble with you, Pym—

  “Oh, yes, I was going to tell you. The trouble with me is——”

  “Ah! The Horseball. We’ll have a drink here and you can wash your face. You’re covered with blood, Pym. ‘Sorry’ Pym! Come and have a wash and a drink. He knocks out Nat the Terror and calls Spitting Lil ‘a lady’, and says he’s afraid he lost his temper. Come on in, come in!”

  *

  “The trouble with me,” said Pym, “is that—Good God!”

  “What’s the matter?” asked Proudfoot.

  “I beg your pardon, but do you see that little man over there?”

  “Well?”

  “The little fellow with the flageolet.”

  “The busker with the tin whistle—yes?”

  “I’d like to hear what he’s saying.”

  “Come to the bar, then.”

  *

  Two old women and a fat old man, who had been buying tomatoes, and a worried flower-seller, nervous as a whippet, who had invested his last pound in chrysanthemums, listened sympathetically and shook their heads sadly as the little fellow held up a broken tin-whistle and delivered his peroration:

  “If I had a couple of shillings I could get a new instrument and buy some sausages to take home, and then get an hour or two’s sleep and start again this evening like a lion refreshed, as the saying goes….”

  The fat old man said: “’Ere y’are; catch ’old,” and gave him a shilling. The old women lifted their skirts, rummaged in dirty canvas bags hung next to their flannel petticoats. One of them gave him fourpence. The other gave him sixpence, saying: “It’s the pore what ’elps the pore.” But the nervous flower-seller took out a half-crown and said, tragically, “’Ere y’are. ’Ave a tosheroon and buy yourself a bleed’n saxerphone … That’s all right. If I don’t do no good to-day I’m Rogered, so it don’t make no difference.”

  “I’m more than grateful, I’m sure,” said the little man with the broken tin-whistle.

  The fat old man said: “You’re right, Nelly. It’s the pore that ’elps the pore. Remember the song, eh, Nelly?” The old woman sang:

  “It’s the pore that ’elps the pore

  When Poverty knocks at the door.

  Those that live in mansions grand

  Orways fail to understand

  The meanin’ of that little word—’Unger!

  I’m shore

  It’s the pore that know the meaning and so

  It’s the pore that ’elps the pore.”

  The flower-seller said: “It makes you fink.”

  Then Pym began to laugh. The tin-whistle player looked up at him and glided away, while the fat old tomato-buyer said: “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

  “I am,” said Pym, “I am, I am! That little fellow got a meal and my last few coppers out of me the other day on that same story, word for word the same story. Wouldn’t you laugh?”

  “Well, would you be
lieve it!” said the flower-seller. “I mean to say—I ask you!”

  “’E’s making it up,” said one of the old women.

  “Come and sit down,” said Proudfoot.

  “I gave him twopence,” said Pym, shaking with laughter.

  “Let’s have a couple of rums, double,” said Proudfoot to the barman, making his voice gruff. “Come and sit down, Pym. The trouble with you, as you were saying, is …”

  *

  “In a nutshell, I’m not strong enough to be what I want to be,” said Pym. “I don’t hang together in the shape I was cut out to be. I can’t explain. People have too much power to hurt me.”

  “To hurt you. Yes?”

  “Oh, not by what they do to me. They hurt me by suffering themselves, and by what they do to other people. For instance: you saw me fighting a little while ago with that man Nat?”

  “I did, and I can tell you that no one but Nat could have stood on his feet after what you did to him, Pym.”

  “Well, it wasn’t what he said to me, you know.”

  “I know. It was because he struck Spitting Lil. Incidentally, she went to prison not very long ago for attempting to throw vitriol into another woman’s eyes. The lowest of the low! Well?”

  “I’m sorry, Proudfoot; I can’t help it. Women, women…. I don’t know, Proudfoot, I don’t know. Did I ever tell you that I practically killed my mother?”

  “With what?”

  “Good God, with nothing! She was a fragile little thing,” said Pym, dabbing at his broken nose with a reddened handkerchief, “and, not to dwell on the subject, I was a difficult boy to get born. I was hard to bring up, too. She was never the same afterwards, Proudfoot. If it hadn’t been for me she’d be alive to-day. As it was, she died at forty-three.”

  “Everyone kills his mother,” said Proudfoot. “Did you turn head-over-heels in the womb with intent to inflict grievous bodily harm? Childbirth involves an inevitable risk as you must very well know.”

  “I know, I know. But … it’s hard to put into words….”

  “Was your mother an invalid?”

  “Why, yes, she was, Proudfoot. An invalid, that’s right.”

  “And your father disliked you on account of that?”

  “Well …” said Pym.

  “Did they sleep together?”

  “Why no, no, they didn’t.”

  “Separate rooms?”

  “Yes, separate rooms. But they were very devoted to each other.”

  “Your father regarded you as the unhappy cause of this separation?” asked Proudfoot. “He hated you for it?”

  “He didn’t seem to be particularly in love with me. But——”

  “—But your mother made up for that. She did not dislike you because you had separated her from her husband?”

  “Good God, no! She was fanatically in love with me. The weaker she got, the more she was devoted to me.”

  “Worshipped the ground you trod on? Worried about your woollen underclothes, kept warning you to take care how you crossed the road when you went out, stayed awake until you came in at night? Made a fool of herself over you, and made no secret of it, eh?”

  “Yes. You’ve got it exactly, Proudfoot.”

  “No brothers or sisters, of course?”

  “My mother couldn’t have any more after me. You seem to know as much about it as I do myself. Were you——”

  “My mother disliked me intensely, for which I am not sorry and do not blame her. I disliked her in return. But go on,” said Proudfoot. “Did your father use to beat you?”

  “Good Lord, no! He was a mining engineer, by the by. Talking of being beaten, I’ll tell you something that’ll make you laugh, Proudfoot. It’s by way of being àpropos. When I first went to school I heard another boy yelling his head off while he was being caned for impudence, or something of the sort. Do you know, it made me sick? And a little later we were asked who drew a certain picture and wrote a certain word on a wall: would the culprit confess? I was so terrified of hearing any more screams that I put up my hand and said: ‘It was I, sir.’ And I got six. My father was informed and he said to my mother: ‘You see the sort of son you’ve given me. Some men are blessed in their families. I’m cursed.’ Oh, the tears, Proudfoot—the weeping, the wailing, the hair-tearing, the reproaches! What was I to do? How could I explain? Mother said: ‘I can forgive, but not forget.’ Dear God, how I cried myself to sleep! You know, I wasn’t allowed any pocket-money. Father said I didn’t need it. There was a boy called Nicker Tott with a hare-lip who liked me. One Guy Fawkes Day he gave me some fireworks, and we let them off together. A few days after, he told me he’d stolen five shillings from his mother to pay for those fireworks and that hell was to pay. So I stole five shillings from my father and gave the money to Nicker Tott, and confessed. I said I’d spent the money on fireworks. Mother wouldn’t let me have fireworks because they were supposed to be dangerous. I did get beaten then all right—Oof!—with a malacca cane, Proudfoot. I was born that way, you see—soft, silly, sorry. You see what I mean? It was always easier to take a beating myself than to see someone else suffering or even to think of it. My father said he wanted me to be—don’t laugh—a barrister. I never could have been, never in a million years! I wanted to be a writer, a writer of books. My father was dead by then. We had nothing to live on. One of my father’s brothers gave my mother a pound or two a week, and a lecture with every shilling, Proudfoot, I give you my word of honour. The shame of it, Proudfoot—the misery of it—the hate! I tried to hide myself. No use. I’d sold my father’s watch to buy a typewriter, and I worked, Proudfoot, as God’s my Judge, I did! ‘Patience,’ I said, ‘patience, Mother; in a little while everything … everything …’ God Almighty knows I wasn’t a lazy man, Proudfoot. But they thought there was a sort of devil in me—something to be driven out. ‘What does Pym do?’ ‘He types all night.’ ‘Types what?’ ‘Types stories.’ One day when I was out … Oh dear, oh dear, poor woman! Poor woman!”

  “Well?”

  “Proudfoot, I swear to you that I was earning as much money as I could.”

  “So?”

  “Well, one day when I was out—it was not her fault—they tore up everything I’d ever written.”

  “They?” said Proudfoot. “Who were ‘they’?”

  “Well …”

  “You mean she.”

  “I suppose so. I’m afraid so. Poor woman, what a state she must have been in to go and do a thing like that! The idea was that she might cure me of this writing madness by tearing up what I’d written,” said Pym, with a tearful laugh. “The pity of it, eh? There’d been a family conference or something of the sort—Mother wouldn’t have done it of her own free will. She never had any free will.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “I went into a mad rage, packed my things, and left the house. It was heartbreaking to hear her cry. But I walked straight out,” said Pym, not without pride. “But my conscience gave me hell, especially when Mother died a year later.”

  “I put it to you that your lady mother would have died in any case.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. I kept my whereabouts secret—I didn’t dare to let her know where I was. She’d have written, you know; oh, the most pathetic letters!”

  “‘Didn’t dare’ is what you said, I think? That is the operative word in your case. You are a cringing little creature in many ways, Pym, I’m afraid. I begin to believe that your so-called Pity, your fear of hurting other people, is nothing more than fear of hurting yourself.” Proudfoot, now, was Proudfoot For The Prosecution. “I put it to you that you have systematically misrepresented yourself, and over a period of years falsified the true state of your emotions. Your much-vaunted Pity is nothing but Self-Pity: weakness, looseness, slackness of soul. Selfishness, Pym—flabby egotism! A great man must master himself before he can do his own bidding and fulfil his destiny. You are not master of yourself. I warn you, Pym, that you are destroying yourself. You are making yourself
impotent with your damned diffidence—your incapacity to meet your own eye!”

  Pym said nothing.

  “Speaking of impotence,” said Proudfoot, in a changed confidential voice, “reminds me of something I intended to talk to you about.”

  Pym nodded.

  “You’re dead beat,” said Proudfoot. “Better get to bed. I’ll tell you about it to-morrow, or the next day. I’ll see you home now.”

  “Whatever you say,” said Pym, drowsily. In the taxi he said: “Poor Win; she was ever so decent to me once upon a time, Proudfoot. She was a fine girl. It was my fault, really….”

  “That young lady,” said Proudfoot, “is a born cheat, a congenital petty-larcenist, an accomplished liar, and a prostitute by vocation. She has been in and out of bed with every blackguard in London, and is designed for jail like a convict’s uniform. ‘Poor Win’—you poor fool! Are you in love with her, or what?”

  “I can’t bear the sight of her,” said Pym. “Only it seems a pity … such a pity….”

  “Stop that and go to bed. Get some sleep, get your typewriter out of pawn, and go to work. Do you hear?”

  “Yes. I’ll do what you say.”

  “To-morrow, or perhaps the day after, I’ll put you in the way of earning—honestly, mind you—some real money. Now go and sleep.”

  “My one and only friend!” sighed Pym.

  Too tired to undress, he threw himself on his bed and slept heavily for ten hours, snoring in his throat because he could not breathe through his broken nose.

  *

  Through the keyhole and under the door crept an oily, malodorous smoke which hung in a white curdy cloud, obscuring that end of the room. The cloud contracted. It blew bubbles. The bubbles blistered and became swollen breasts. A twisted neck of smoke swung like a glass-blower’s pipe, and let a shimmering bladder which burst with a slobbering gasp and shrunk into the likeness of a face—Mrs. Greensleeve’s face, disgustingly scorched, with black-edged flames in the eye sockets. She was smiling and licking her shrivelled lips. Her left nipple puffed a smoke-ring: it came over like a lariat photographed in slow-motion, and crept taut about Pym’s neck. Smoky coils encircled him. He could not move. “Now, dear,” said a voice that sounded like frying meat, and the ponderous smoke enveloped him. He struggled and sat up, striking right and left.