The Song of the Flea

by Gerald Kersh

“But, darling,” said Rocky, “I mean … what is there to be annoyed about? I mean, darling, she got the stuff ready earlier than she said. Darling, I mean to say, there’s nothing wrong in that.”

  Sissy Voltaire picked up a glass cigarette box and Rocky instinctively ducked. But she only took out a cigarette and said: “Very well.”

  “How about your lunch?” asked Pym.

  “We lunch late. We keep late hours, Johnny darling. We’ve only just had breakfast,” she said. And so they sat on the big sofa, turning over the pages of Mrs. Greensleeve’s play That We May Not Weep. Freshly typed and beautifully bound in blue and buff, it looked impressive and sounded better than before. At last Pym said: “As far as I can see there isn’t a terrible lot for me to do—nothing that I couldn’t do in half a day. It’s merely a matter of scraping off a bit here and smoothing out a bit there. And one or two cuts, I should think. Take, for example, this bit:

  There was a time when, as a young girl, I imagined that if I had a home of my own in the country I should be happy. And here I am in a midland slum, in a temporary bed-sitting-room with an iron bedstead and a coke fire within and nothing but fog and darkness outside—knowing that next week I shall be on my way again in a cold third-class carriage to another slum, darker and dirtier even than this—and yet I’m happy. I want the fog and the cold, the little furnished room with the smoky little fire fed with coal at sixpence a scuttle. I want the black tea, skim milk, burned toast and rancid margarine sent up on a cheap tin tray from the kitchen underground, and thrown down by a worn-out charwoman. Because I love you, you see I love you.

  Now that, I think,” said Pym, “is a little bit too much of a good thing.”

  There were tears in Sissy Voltaire’s eyes as she said: “You’ll leave that alone, you know.” Then she read the passage and, looking up at the end, kissed Rocky on the tip of the nose and called him Lillybums because he was wiping his eyes with his expensive handkerchief. “No, Johnny darling, you’ll leave that alone.”

  Pym said: “Just as you say. It isn’t my play: I didn’t write it.”

  *

  Thus, ten days later, Pym was able with a clear conscience to order two suits and a light overcoat at Redbird & Shipman, late of Savile Row. His credit was good; he had a hundred pounds in the London & Suburban Bank. He paid cash for two pairs of thirty-shilling shoes, six pairs of socks, twelve handkerchiefs, three ties, and half a dozen absorbent cotton male support underpants; and for two new typewriter ribbons, two reams of quarto paper, fifty sheets of carbon paper, five hundred white metal paper clips, and two hundred and fifty brass paper fasteners of assorted sizes. With these clips and fasteners a man might clip and fasten a four-page prose poem or a Boule de Suif. He spent eight-and-sixpence on a looseleaf notebook with attached propelling pencil, in case of inspiration. One never knew. All of a sudden, in a train, in a lavatory, in a restaurant, there might be a stab of dazzling light out of the clouds in the skull, and if there were not pencil and paper to hand a great thought might be lost. This thoughtfully devised notebook and pencil, five and a half inches long by three inches wide, might fit into the pocket of a pyjama suit. Samuel Taylor Coleridge conceived poems in his sleep. If he had not happened to have pencil and paper handy the world might have lost Kubla Khan.

  Pym went to the Five Shilling Shop and bought a suit of pyjamas. The cheapest pyjama suit with pockets cost seven-and-sixpence, but he bought it. It was maroon-coloured with grey collars and cuffs, and the notebook fitted the pockets perfectly. Now he found that he had a yearning for stationery. He vacillated ten minutes outside another shop and bought a ream of pink paper, a ream of yellow paper, a gazetteer of the world and an address book bound in artificial leather.

  (Seven years later the address book was still almost unused. The gilt on the edges had gone black. The thumb-index looked like dead leaves. He pitied himself, then, for having bought it; but could not part with it. So he placed it next to the gazetteer of the world and left it alone. Looking back, then, he remembered many things that made him want to laugh, and cry.)

  That stationer sold everything. Pym bought a copy of Van Gogh’s Bowl of Sunflowers in a pale oak frame and ordered fifty visiting cards. He did not forget to buy four rolls of toilet paper. In every roll there were a thousand leaves, and every leaf was medicated in case of infection. The salesman told Pym that much of the unhappiness of the world came out of unmedicated toilet paper. Some paper was full of sharp fibres, which gave rise to irritability. Other brands melted, so to speak, at a touch. There were degrees, Pym was informed. “Put your tongue to it and see how it takes up the moisture, sir, without losing its toughness.”

  “Make it six,” said Pym.

  From the tobacconist near where he lived he bought five hundred cigarettes, twelve boxes of red-tipped matches (the sort that strike anywhere), and a bottle of gum; and he ordered The Times, to make a good impression, and the Daily Express, to be delivered every morning.

  The newsagent had a public telephone. Pym rang Joanna Bowman. “Come and have tea?” he said.

  “If you like.”

  “Five o’clock?”

  “About five-fifteen, if you like. Where?”

  “What about my place?”

  “All right, your place if you like. Is it that Battersea address you gave me?”

  “Shall I pick you up?”

  “No, that’s all right—I’ll find my way. By five-thirty, then.”

  “I shall be ever so glad to see you.”

  “Five-thirty? Good-bye.”

  Pym bought five shillings’ worth of flowers, and a dozen assorted pastries. He went to a crockery shop and selected four cups and saucers, delicately fluted and imprinted with little gold clover leaves. Seeing that there were accessories to match he bought a teapot, a water jug, a slop basin, and—on an afterthought—two egg cups. The shopkeeper had made up the parcel when Pym, with an idiotic smile, picked up a pair of pink-and-white cylindrical vases and said: “These things—how much are they?”

  “Do you those three-and-six each, sir.”

  “Those. I’ll have those. And this,” he said, delicately lifting a china toast-rack.

  “Will that be all, sir?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “What about a nice tray?” said the salesman, showing Pym a massive tray of pressed iron, stamped with little Japanese girls playing with apples. “This is a snip. Only two left. Do you this one two-and-nine.”

  “Oh, all right, do me that one for two-and-nine,” said Pym, humorously, “but don’t show me anything more.”

  “Nice nest of ash-trays? Genuine Japanese. Six ash-trays in a nest—two-and-three. Have a nice nest of ash-trays, eh?”

  “All right then, a nest of ash-trays.”

  While the salesman was making up the parcel he said, with a leer: “Little tantalus?”

  “No, thanks ever so much.”

  “I always think it’s kind of common to have a bare bottle on the table—like plonking down a sticky jam jar with the label on it, so that everybody can see how much you paid for it. Why don’t you let me do you a pair of cut glass decanters?”

  “No, really, thanks all the same.”

  “Nice little cruet? Or what about one of those dainty little breakfast sets? Teapot, water jug, milk jug, sugar basin, plate, cup, saucer, butter dish, jam pot, for one—nine pieces, complete with tray, eleven-and-six.”

  Pym had a sneaking hope that Joanna might still be with him next breakfast time. “All right, I’ll have one of those.”

  On his way home he stopped at a draper’s shop to buy a small tablecloth, and came out with a fancifully scalloped tea cloth and six dainty napkins. Then he spent a tormented half hour in his sitting-room, putting an ash-tray here and an ash-tray there, arranging his flowers in precise geometrical patterns, moving vases, and shaking cushions. Then, remembering that he had no hammer and nail with which to hang up his new picture he ran breathlessly to the ironmonger’s and came back twenty minutes later with a t
wo-pound claw hammer, a box of brass-headed nails, a box of tintacks, a patent tin-opener with which it was impossible to cut the fingers, a knife sharpener, and (cursing himself for a fool) a hand-saw and a steel tape-measure, to justify the purchase of which he neatly trimmed a splintered corner of the deal table in the kitchen and measured every room in the flat. He was interested to discover that the sitting-room was sixteen feet long and eighteen feet wide—a fact which he solemnly recorded in his new notebook with the propelling pencil, which broke under the strain and never worked again.

  At twenty past five he began to worry, and to listen for footsteps in the street. Joanna Bowman arrived at twenty-five to six. He was greatly relieved, for he had begun to fear that, being of a scornful and reckless disposition, she had not taken sufficient care in crossing the road. By five thirty-two he was already shuddering away from a vision of Joanna Bowman hideously mangled under the wheels of a double-decker bus. And when he heard her footsteps on the stairs he went to the door like a man kicked in the behind.

  *

  After tea he said: “You remember that night?”

  “What night?”

  “That night when I was at your place.”

  “Oh, that! Well?”

  “Your husband was waiting outside.”

  “He would be,” she said, laughing. “What happened?”

  “Nothing. He threatened to break every bone in my body.”

  “He would. Were you impressed?”

  “In a way. The poor fellow sounded so miserable.”

  “That’s the way it goes. You’re sorry for him because he’s unhappy without me—not that he’d be much happier with me, I assure you. And if I let him come back you’d find a great deal of pleasure in being sorry for me because you’d think I was unhappy with him. What did you say when he threatened to break every bone in your body?”

  “I just told him to go home.”

  “And he went?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And what would you have done if he’d hit you?”

  “I don’t know. Feeling sorry for the man I’d probably have done nothing—just held his arms till he cooled off, and told him to go home again.”

  “You would, I daresay. Yes, that would be your reaction.”

  “And yours? How would you react in a case like that?”

  “Me? If anyone hit me, my reaction would be … say, like the reaction of a rake-handle when you step on the rake: I’d fly up and hit back as hard as I could. I won’t take that kind of tiling. I simply won’t submit to tyranny. I’m not made to. I’d rather die.”

  “And I,” said Pym, sighing. “I’ll submit to almost anything. I’ll be still, and wait.”

  “Wait for revenge?”

  “Oh, no. Wait until I see what’s to be seen. If anyone came up to you out of the blue sky, so to speak, and slapped your face, you’d instinctively hit back. Wouldn’t you?”

  “And how!”

  “If somebody did the same to me, I’d wonder what the devil made him want to do it. I’d begin to ask myself if he had a reasonable reason for slapping my face.”

  “And if you decided that he had?”

  “My hands would be tied. I couldn’t fight if I believed I was in the wrong … that I was not in the right.”

  “You’d let him beat you.”

  “No, I wouldn’t let him beat me. But I couldn’t beat him. I’d hold him until he got calm.”

  “As it might have been in the case of Swan?” asked Joanna.

  “Yes.”

  “And if he wouldn’t be held? If he wouldn’t get calm? What’d happen then?”

  “I’d have to force him to be calm,” said Pym. “If necessary I’d give him a swift, painless punch on the chin.”

  “Even if you were too weak? If you were a woman?”

  “Naturally I couldn’t,” said Pym.

  “Ah-ah! But what would happen if you knew that you were in the right? The man attacks you. What happens?”

  “Of course, I’d fight till I dropped. Naturally. What else could I do?”

  “Tell me, Pym—why?”

  “A matter of human dignity. Nobody in the world has the right to push me about. Better dead than pushed about. That’s why I’d fight until I dropped,” said Pym. “No matter who it was … as long as I felt indignant—I mean, as long as I knew I was right. But I don’t think I could have brought myself to hit your husband, even though I happened to be jealous of him. In his way he’s in the right … My dearest Joanna—who wouldn’t make a fool of himself for you?”

  “No, no—not just yet,” said Joanna Bowman, pulling aside Pym’s hand.

  “Beg pardon.”

  “No, please—don’t beg pardon, Pym. I like it when you hold me. Shall I tell you something? You’re about the only man I didn’t mind being touched by. I’ve always hated being touched. But for some reason or other I like you to touch me. Only I was thinking. I wasn’t trying to convey to you that I didn’t want you.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes, very much.”

  “Here I am, Jo; all yours,” said Pym, “and I’ve been thinking of practically nothing and nobody but you since I met you. I really am getting around to falling very much in love with you, Jo.”

  “Don’t. I’d rather you didn’t fall in love with me, Pym.”

  “Why not?”

  “Oh, Pym, Pym! I don’t like it. So many men have fallen in love with me, or said they had; and the deeper they fell the more I had to despise them in the long run—it brought out the worst in them in the end. Please don’t fall in love with me, Pym.”

  “Love makes weak people weaker and strong people stronger, Jo,” said Pym. “And in any case there’s nothing you can do about it. I have already fallen in love with you.”

  “I don’t want to be in love with you,” said Joanna. “I don’t like Love.”

  Pym said: “Even fishes and birds know the meaning of love—even wolves—even foxes and cows and mice. That’s about the only thing that ever makes them noble!”

  “I’m not a cow or a fox, or a mouse. I don’t need any spurs to make me run, or any calves to make me brave; or any litter of sucking pigs to make me bite. I don’t need any man to stimulate me. I daresay I shock you.”

  “Not exactly,” said Pym. “In a way you make me laugh.”

  “Do you know what?” said Joanna Bowman, “I’m very glad I make you laugh.”

  “Are you? Why?”

  “I’ve made so many men cry. I hate making men cry. If I’d made you cry I couldn’t possibly have anything more to do with you. And I like you, Pym,” said Joanna. “I’d dislike you if you cried over me. Go on laughing. Don’t ever on any account let me make you cry over me … Go on letting me make you laugh.”

  Later Pym said: “I won’t repeat this if it’s offensive to you, but I want to put it on record that I am deeply devoted to you, and love you.”

  Joanna Bowman said: “You are something like what I was led to believe that a man might be, physically and otherwise.”

  *

  Soon she was gone. Pym sniffed at the pillow upon which her head had rested, and then went to his typewriter and began to write. Relaxed and happy, he wrote calmly until he was tired. This was at five o’clock in the morning. He ate sardines and strawberry jam, drank bottled beer, and went to bed, where he slept happily. He had written the first two thousand words of The Road to the Iron Door; big work was begun, and he was in love.

  Pym slept as honest workmen sleep.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  MR. MELLISH spent most of the morning in bed. His housekeeper knocked at his door at eight o’clock, by which time he was invariably wide awake, reading a book, sitting upright against three fat white pillows and buttoned up to the chin in a blue-and-white flannel sleeping suit. “Come in, Mrs. Moore,” he said, and she came in with a tray that had four moveable legs, which she arranged so that he could reach without effort a pot of tea, a boiled egg, six fingers of hot buttered toast,
the Daily Telegraph, and the letters. Then he always said: “Thank you very much, Mrs. Moore. And how are you this morning, Mrs. Moore?”

  She replied: “Thank you, Mr. Mellish, and how’s yourself?”

  “Blooming, blooming, Mrs. Moore.”

  Mrs. Moore used to stand smiling at the old gentleman while he opened his egg. He always insisted on her eating the top of it, saying: “Albumen, albumen Mrs. Moore. Good for the blood, good for the blood.” They talked a little while he opened his letters. Most of his correspondence was with fellow architects. Most of the letters he received were addressed in familiar handwriting. Mr. Mellish was afraid of typewritten addresses, franked envelopes and strange handwriting: he always left them till the last and sighed with relief when his little ivory paper-knife cut out something harmlessly commonplace. Mrs. Moore always sat with him when he opened his letters: he liked her to do so. If she didn’t talk while he was reading he would say: “What’s the matter with you this morning, Mrs. Moore? Are you in love? He-he!”

  She always said: “My loving days are over.”

  So he looked at his mail, putting one letter on his left knee and another on his right, and (having examined the postmarks) neatly folded the fastidiously-cut envelopes before throwing them aside. When he had eaten his egg, poured himself another cup of tea, and opened his newspaper Mrs. Moore went out, very quietly, and went downstairs. About an hour later she came up again and asked him what he would like for lunch. “Now let me see. What would you suggest, Mrs. Moore?” he always asked. She pretended to think and then said brightly: “I know. What about a nice cutlet?” It was one of their little jokes. For the last forty-seven years Mr. Mellish had eaten a cutlet for lunch every day: he had a harmless passion for lamb cutlets very well done.

  Then he would dress slowly and carefully and, if the weather was warm, went for a walk smoking a purple calabash pipe comfortably curved like the top of his old walking stick. If it was raining he sat by the fire and read the Daily Telegraph—every word of it. Mrs. Moore bringing him a cup of coffee and a biscuit at eleven o’clock always found him poring over the small advertisements, and invariably said: “Don’t tell me you’re looking for a job, Mr. Mellish!” And he invariably replied: “Well, I don’t know, Mrs. Moore. I may yet come to want in my old age.”