The Song of the Flea

by Gerald Kersh

  Pym bit his lip and said nothing. Proudfoot continued:

  “Johnny, I don’t know why it is but I love you like a son—and, as you know, I admire you as a master. If I had your gift of language I’d be able to make myself tolerably clear. Here is a job that is going to be done. Whatever you say or do this scientific work of Dr. Weissensee will be put into decent English and published by Thurtell Hunt, Mayerling & Co. My partners and I, together with some of the best-respected scientific thinkers in the world, consider Dr. Weissensee’s work to be a genuine contribution to Science. It will not be available, I may say, to every adolescent that pokes his, her, or its nose into a book shop. It will be published in a limited edition, carefully sealed, at three guineas a copy. It will be carefully and conspicuously marked as being published for serious students of psychology only. There will be no attractive presentation—the readers of Dr. Weissensee’s work, Geschlechtiche Verirrungen Im Verhaeltnis Zur Kunst Im Lauf Der Zeit Einschliesslich Spezial Faelle In Der Zeit Zwischen 1675 Und 1935 Mit Einer Bemerkung Ueber Auto-Erotik, will read it as a textbook, and not as casual reading matter. But—I beg pardon. This is beside the point. Some of the deepest thinkers, some of the most far-reaching intellects in the world, approve strongly. You, however, disapprove of this book. Am I right?”

  “Yes.”

  “You disapprove strongly, I take it?”

  “I’m afraid I do, Proudfoot,” said Pym.

  “How strange, how passing strange!” said Proudfoot, smiling and shaking his head. “I thought I knew a little of men until I met you, Johnny. And now I know that the more I know, the less I know. Disapproving as you do, you are prepared to hand the rewriting of Dr. Weissensee’s work over to someone else who, you assure me, will rewrite it more effectively than you could. In other words, you are prepared to give your blessing and your support to that which you hate and despise—provided you are not called upon directly to touch it with your fastidious fingers. Well, well, well! My dear fellow!”

  Pym said: “Proudfoot, I feel indebted to you. I can assure you that I say ‘Well, well, well’ also. If you were a stranger I’d simply walkout of the office. But you’ve been good to me. You keep telling me this thing is important to you. If you’re a publisher you must have a list—there must be other books——”

  “—But this is a book of the first importance,” said Proudfoot.

  “—I told you once before,” said Pym, in agony, “I’m soft. I absolutely must pay back a good turn. I don’t like the book, Proudfoot. I do hate it, Dr. Weissensee. I’m sorry to have to say so to your face, but I do. But there it is. Proudfoot, you tell me it will come out in any case. All right. I’m not going to touch it myself. If I introduce you to someone who will, won’t that acquit me?”

  Proudfoot moved his hands as if he were playing inaudible five-finger exercises in the air, and said: “I don’t think you quite understand, my dear fellow. You are the man who can put this book into clean English, pure and clean English. You’re a faithful writer with a highly developed conscience. You can retain the doctor’s factual material and still keep the book clean. We have no objection whatsoever to your adding footnotes and chapter indices, or even commentaries. I believe, Johnny, that you alone can make this scientific work acceptable to the English-speaking people. And still you want to give it to a hack writer to write.”

  “I’m sorry, Proudfoot: I really don’t want to write it,” said Pym. “For instance: haven’t you ever come across a brief you’d rather not have taken?”

  “No,” said Proudfoot. “No, never. The harder the game the better. I, my dear fellow, am a lawyer—I am Rhadamanthus—I am impartial—I hold the scales. I defend, and I prosecute, according to the weights in the pan on my left hand or my right hand. I kill or I cure, I hang or I revive, strictly in accordance with the evidence.”

  “I live, Proudfoot, according to my instincts. Honest to God, I can’t write your book.”

  “Yet you will let it be written?”

  “Yes. For you, Proudfoot, yes—let it be written. But not by me.”

  “I cannot begin to see how you, Johnny, reconcile this with your delicate conscience.”

  “No more can I, Proudfoot. But you’re my very good friend. Meanwhile, now that I come to think of it, here is a five-pound note I owe you.”

  Pym put a five-pound note on the desk. Proudfoot looked at it, saw that it was new, and said: “Ah. Oh-oh! I see, I see! You have come into money, is that it?”

  “It isn’t that at all.”

  “Ah well, there it is. You’ve come into money. If you could have brought yourself to say so before, everything might have been simpler: you would have saved my time and yours. Don’t trouble to give me the address of your friend. I daresay we’ll manage. Now let me congratulate you on your good fortune and bid you good day. This——” said Proudfoot, touching the five-pound note with a fingertip—“this is yours. You were so good as to lend it to me. But let there be no ill feeling….”

  Proudfoot took a bottle and two glasses out of a cupboard in his desk and said: “Will you, at least, have a farewell drink with me? I believe, Johnny, that we have been very good friends in our time?”

  “By all means,” said Pym. “—No, no, much smaller than that, Proudfoot, please!”

  Proudfoot had half-filled a tumbler. He pulled it to his side of the desk and poured half an inch of brandy for Pym. They drank. Proudfoot swallowed his drink like medicine, blew his nose into a fine linen handkerchief, and said, with a curious shudder: “We’ll leave this book in abeyance, Johnny. It’s far too important a work to scamp. Think it over carefully, my dear fellow. Think it over for a week, a month, two months if necessary.”

  “All right,” said Pym, “let’s leave it at that.”

  “God bless you, then,” said Proudfoot. “Will you have lunch with me to-morrow?”

  “I’d love to, but I shall be working terribly hard from now on,” said Pym. “By the way, my new address is 35, Leopold Crescent, Battersea. I’ve taken a little flat. From now on I shall be working like stink on a book. Yes, I shall be working like hell.”

  *

  Dr. Weissensee rushed out of the office spitting and hissing “Persecution! Persecution! Persecution!” and Sherwood arrived, smoking a pipe and wearing a studiously unconventional suit of dark grey flannel with a yellow waistcoat. He was carrying an ashplant and a portfolio, and somehow the ashplant made him look like an up-and-coming energetic young publisher with plenty of nerve and an inexhaustible supply of good ideas. Proudfoot looked at him with approval and said: “God knows how you do it. You could have made a fortune on the stage, my dear fellow.”

  “Well, how goes it?”

  Now Thomas Paine Sherwood spoke in a hurried undertone—in the quick, quiet voice of a man accustomed to saying a great deal as quickly and quietly as possible in public lavatories, prison corridors, and hotel lobbies. Proudfoot said:

  “Very well indeed. Auto-Erotism In The Female has gone to press. So has Sex Life In Renaissance Italy, and The Forbidden Frescoes At Pompeii. We ought to have Gee’s Secret Rites of the Asmodeists and Women and Satan in proof next week. I am having a little trouble with our young friend Pym. He has some qualms about rewriting Dr. Weissensee’s book.”

  “For that matter, so have I.”

  “My dear fellow, you need have none at all. I give you my word of honour, we’ll get away with it.”

  “If you say so, all right. But look here, Proudfoot, who the hell cares whether this pipsqueak does it or not? You can find a hack in any pub in Fleet Street. Why waste time running after this one?”

  Proudfoot looked at him with pity and said: “You are a very clever fellow, my friend, but not quite clever enough. This isn’t one of those smash-and-grab, snatch-and-run affairs. An average hack is just what we do not want. This young man is a real writer, a brilliant writer. Only by turning that stinking muck into literature can we get away with it. You will be guided by me in this, my dear fellow. Do you hear? Y
ou will do as I say. Have you ever known me to fail?”

  “Once,” said Sherwood, with a grin.

  “Have I ever failed you?”

  “Have it your way,” said Sherwood, “I still think you know more tricks than a wagonload of foxes.”

  “I know more tricks, my dear fellow, than ten wagonloads of foxes. I know the law as few men on this earth have ever known it. Be guided by me and we’ll make tens of thousands—legitimately at that. Don’t worry. Pym will do as I tell him to do. I’ve got him like this,” said Proudfoot, squeezing an empty matchbox with such force that it broke in his hand. “Mark my words. Have a drink.”

  “Isn’t it a bit early to start knocking it back as hard as this?” asked Sherwood.

  “Yes, my dear fellow, it is a bit early. But you know me, I believe. Drunk or sober, have you ever come across any man born of woman whom I couldn’t handle?”

  “All the same, it might be a good idea to go easy on that stuff just for a bit, just until we get started, don’t you think?”

  “As you say, my dear fellow, it might be a good idea in general. I should advise anyone else to take your hint. But I am so constituted that this stuff has not the slightest effect on me. In fact, since you drag the subject up, it clarifies my mind. So if you won’t, I will. Your very good health!”

  Sherwood watched his partner as he threw back his head, gulped his drink, and put down his glass noisily with a lordly gesture; and he thought: I’m not so sure about that “clarifying” part. He clarified himself just a little bit too bloody much with that stuff, once upon a time … And so did I. But he said nothing. He was still convinced that Proudfoot was one of the three greatest men of the age. The other two were Ivar Kreuger and Thomas Paine Sherwood, both of whom, like Proudfoot, had been the victims of malignant fate. He also had a great respect for Alphonse Capone but regretted that that public character had recourse to violence, which he detested. Incidentally, if Sherwood had had the choice of a wife he would have chosen Lily Langtry, and if, in lawful wedlock with the Jersey Lily, he had begotten a son, he would have wanted him to be a great master of words, like Roget, whose Thesaurus he had learned by heart in jail.

  “I’ll have one too, just a small one,” he said.

  *

  Pym hurried away to Battersea to look at his new home. There was a stuffed sofa upon which masterpieces might be conceived, and two easy-chairs to match, in which one might lie back and talk about them; a little oak table upon which masterpieces might be written, and a big divan upon which a toil-worn master might sleep and dream of masterpieces. The lavatory was good enough for Shakespeare. The bath was a better bath than Chaucer ever had. There was a Dickensian quality in the gas stove. In the kitchen cupboard the previous tenants had left the best part of a packet of salt, a good tablespoonful of tea in a tin box painted with Chinese landscapes, and three quarters of a packet of pepper; part of a jar of mustard pickles, only slightly mildewed, and a small quantity of perfectly good Worcester sauce in a bottle. There were knives, forks, spoons, three tin-openers, and one of those little steel trestles upon which our fathers used to rest the great two-pronged forks with which the Sunday joints were carved. Pym found six glasses, all different; four cups, eight saucers, nine plates of interestingly odd shapes and sizes, a big brown teapot, and a little blue teapot-lid. There were fifteen ashtrays printed with brewers’ and distillers’ advertising matter—a collector had lived here, a collector and a humorist, for on the bathroom wall just above the fixture that was supposed to hold the toilet paper, he had fixed a little sign which he must have unscrewed from a railway compartment. It said: To stop the train pull chain downwards. Penalty for improper use £5. He must have been a brave man to help himself to a thing like that; and a resourceful man too, for he had made a bookcase out of an orange box, tastefully painted red. The flat was full of delightful surprises. In the bathroom cabinet, which was of white painted metal blotched with rust, there were thirty-two used razor blades, with which Dostoevsky himself might have sharpened pencils; three aspirin tablets in a perfectly good bottle, admirably designed to fit the waistcoat pocket; a collapsible tube with at least two good squeezes of shaving cream left in it, and a generous quarter of a bottle of lysol.

  Pym chuckled with sheer delight, and went out shopping.

  He went to Woolworths, that kindly institution, and a bought a big tin kettle, a set of carving knives, a new frying-pan, some soap, and—he never knew why—an electric torch that went into the breast pocket on a clip like a fountain pen. (Years later he found this in a bootbox full of buttons, nails and unidentifiable bits of metal, and sat for two hours wondering what made him buy it.) He spent a mad quarter of an hour in the nearest grocery shop, spending like a paid-off harpooner in a saloon after a two years’ voyage. He bought pork-and-beans in prodigious quantities, sardines, anchovies, tinned milk in case of emergency, orange juice in case of thirst, tinned strawberries, strawberry jam, strawberry jelly, strawberry blancmange, tinned steak-and-kidney pudding, boxes of cheese, tinned plum pudding, a tin of paté de foie gras, coffee packed in an airtight tin, four tins of pineapple chunks, two tins of pineapple rings, a tin of crushed pineapple, a tin of pineapple juice; six tins of corned beef, three tins of stewed beef, two tins of spiced beef, on tin of devilled beef and a bottle of Beefo. As an afterthought he added a pound of sausages, a pound of butter, a pound of tea, and a pound of cooking fat. Then, on his way out, he stopped and spun round like a man shot between the eyes, ran back and ordered six tins of herrings in tomato sauce, three tins of herrings in mustard sauce, two tins of Norwegian brisling, and a bottle of anchovy sauce. Even then he was not satisfied, for, looking into the window—he could not tear himself free from this fascinating shop—he saw a display of tinned soup. Having ordered six tomato, four bouillon (no, make it five), three mulligatawny, two mock turtle, two chicken and one beef broth, he stopped out of shame; but hesitated again and said: “Oh, and three of those tins of marrow-fat green peas … and if you don’t mind, I want this delivered immediately, in about ten minutes.”

  “Deliver it about six this evening if you like, sir.”

  “That’ll be fine. Oh, and you’d better let me have two tins of spinach. That’ll be all, I think.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Oh, yes, how silly of me! I better have a pound of that bacon.”

  “Ham, sir?”

  “I suppose I’d better have a pound of ham. Oh-oh, yes—and a pound of sugar,” said Pym, “and now that really is the lot.”

  Ten seconds later he returned, blushing, and said: “I forgot. A pound of bread—I mean, a big loaf of bread, one of those large loaves over there. Oh, by the by, is that cake any good? Better send a pound. Ah, yes, I see you have beer. Will you send me one of those quarts? No, better make it six.”

  It occurred to Pym that he was a man with a flat, now, and people might turn up. It was a good thing to have something in the house to offer people when they turned up, he thought, as he went to Busto’s for his typewriter.

  *

  “Busto,” said Pym, “before I go I want to tell you that of all the unmitigated old bastards on the face of the earth, you just about take the cake.”

  “You tellin’ me?” said Busto. “Keep it! I ’eard-a it before.”

  “Often, I bet,” said Pym.

  “Sure. I care what you think? You think a-what you like, I think a-what I like for you. I don’t care. You go to ’ell your way, I go to ’ell my way. Okay?”

  Pym said: “All the same, Busto, one can’t help somehow liking you—you’re such an unmitigated bastard; you’re such a thorough-going, hundred per cent, undiluted, dyed-in-the-wool, yard-wide, intransigent bastard. You’re such a cast-iron bastard. One knows where one is with you. You’re a bastard with no nonsense about you.”

  Pym was drunk with joy. Busto looked at him without emotion and said: “Sure. Okay.”

  “And d’you know what? If the pubs were open I’d ask you to come out and have a dri
nk with me.”

  “I give you a drink,” said Busto.

  Pym was shocked into silence. Busto, impatiently tapping the floor of the passage with one of his shapeless feet said: “You wanna drink?”

  Pym nodded. Busto nodded too, and beckoned. They went downstairs into the basement. Busto thrust a cracked teacup into Pym’s hands and filled it with something from a bottle. “Drink,” he said.

  “And you?” asked Pym.

  Busto made a gesture with the bottle, put the neck of it to his lips, swallowed noisily two or three times, sighed, and said: “Cheerio.”

  Pym emptied his cup, holding his breath.

  “Whasa matter? Wine,” said Busto.

  “Thank you, that was very good indeed,” said Pym, retching and gasping.

  “Where you goin’?”

  “I’m going to live in Battersea. I have a self-contained flat.”

  “You come into-a money?”

  “I’m settling down to do some work.”

  “Writin’ alwiz?”

  “Always writing.”

  Busto looked at Pym for several seconds; then he distorted his face so that he seemed to be smiling and said: “I tell you: you’ll a-be back. I’m a bastard? Okay. You’ra bloody fool. You’ll a-be back. What for you writin’? What you make? What you do? Where you get? Don’ be silly. Give it up, cut it out. Don’ be silly.”

  “It’s always a pleasure to see you,” said Pym, “but what with one thing and another I hope I’m saying good-bye and not au revoir. Here’s my address in case of letters. Good-bye, Busto.”

  “A rivederci,” said Busto.

  Then Pym went to Battersea, and spent nearly an hour placing his typewriter in a certain position, and arranging the chair upon which he proposed to sit and work. The groceries came and he made a great display of the tin cans in the kitchen. This display was so beautiful that he could not leave it. He played. On walls of tinned fruit he built battlements of bully beef. He boiled a kettle, made tea, and ate cold steak-and-kidney pudding out of a tin, lying on the sofa in front of the gas fire.