The Song of the Flea

by Gerald Kersh

  But Pym was in trouble again.

  *

  His typewriter had disappeared. Pym had hoped (for he had faith in human honesty) that the man or woman who had found it would say: “It is a very nice typewriter, and I am strongly tempted to walk off with it and keep it. But who knows? It may belong to some poor author who hopes to get his living out of it. I will therefore take it to the nearest police station.” This is what Pym would have said to himself if he had found a portable typewriter. He would have resisted even the little temptation to borrow it for a day or two for fear that the owner, crazed by his loss, might do something desperate.

  He was quite sure, therefore, that he would find his typewriter waiting for him at the police station. But the sergeant shook his head and said: “Nope, sorry, no typewriters. Remember the number?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you let me have the number and we’ll send out a note about it. I daresay somebody or other just helped himself to it and went and flogged it at a typewriter-shop or a pawnshop…. Number?”

  The sergeant took up a pencil, but Pym said: “Oh, no! Thanks all the same. No more of that for me. Let’s give it up as a bad job; write it off.”

  “Please yourself. It’s your typewriter.”

  Then Pym went to a shop in St. Martin’s Lane and paid twelve guineas for a brand new typewriter of the latest pattern. It had everything—large clear type, tabular key, margin release, the four French accents, several mathematical signs and an asterisk; and it was fitted with a silencer, so that instead of chattering it whispered. People might be sleeping in the same room with you while you, the insomniac genius, beat out a masterpiece; and this astounding machine would let them sleep. He loved it as soon as he saw it. “That one,” he said; but the startled salesman could not stop his sales talk, and pointed out the strength and the beauty of the typewriter—the type-bars made of a special alloy compared with which steel was mere plasticine—the platen roller that came right off at the pressure of a button—the touch adjuster, by means of which the keys were adjusted to any hand. Did you hit your machine great swinging blows like Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom? Touch the touch adjuster. Did you finger your keys like a six-year-old girl secretly exploring the soft, pulsating part of her new-born brother’s skull? Touch the touch adjuster. In either case—smack!—down went the word, cleancut as God’s commandments chiselled into the stone tablets that Moses made and broke….

  “—And look,” said the salesman, “if you want to get to the underneath part, all you need to do is just press this little thing here, push sideways, lift, and there you are. No screws, everything simplified. See? Push—lift. Let it down, and it clips right back into position. Immovable. Try it and see.”

  “All right, I see. I’ll have that one.”

  “We can put your initials on the cover—that’s a waterproof cover—with no extra charge, sir.”

  Pym thought that it would be a very good thing to own a beautiful typewriter like this, with J. P. in gold on the cover. But he remembered his cigarette-case. He was rich, and in spite of all the devils in hell and Fleet Street he was going to be richer still. Yet he said: “No. Leave it as it ‘is.”

  “Brushes? Oil? Special plastic cleaner? Paper? Carbon? Files?”

  “Nothing more,” said Pym. He wanted to take his machine home and play with it.

  At home he took off the cover and typed the sentence about the fox that jumped over the lazy dog. What the salesman had said was true: the typewriter made no noise. At first, Pym was amused and delighted by this. Then it irritated him. This prostitute-by-vocation of a typewriter took in a great, crashing, bold sentence and degraded it to something sly and confidential. All things to all men, with her touch adjuster, she looked out of the corners of her eyes and talked half-audibly out of the corners of her mouth.

  He was trying to love and understand this quiet, enigmatic typewriter when, at ten o’clock on Monday morning, a gentleman came to see him—a plump, pale man with bold yet cowardly blue eyes, whose manner, compounded of impudence and vigilance, made Pym think of a pederast behind the veil of the steam in a Turkish bath. Instinctively, Pym hated him. He seemed to be gloating over a furtive triumph, like a waiter who has just spat in your soup. Pym read, on his card, that his name was Cicero Greensleeve and that he was a solicitor.

  “Greensleeve!” said Pym. “You wouldn’t be, by any chance, any relation to Mrs. Mary Daphne Greensleeve?”

  “Her son, Mr. Pym. Pardon the intrusion. Miss Voltaire advised me to get in touch with you. I didn’t go through the formality of writing because you gentlemen of letters—you won’t take offence, I’m sure, if I say so—are well-known for your preoccupation with other things, more important things than dry letters from us lawyers. And why should you take the trouble to answer them? No one pays you for answering a lawyer’s letter; and your writing is worth good money—so much a word, I believe. It was scarcely worth troubling you about, in any case, because it’s such a simple little matter. In a case like this five minutes friendly conversation does away with the need for five days of delay. So I took the liberty of calling on you at this unearthly hour because I thought I’d find you at home. You lucky men are not slaves to routine like us lawyers.”

  “Well, what is it?” asked Pym; but he knew already that Cicero Greensleeve’s business, whatever it was, was awkward business, bad business.

  The solicitor settled himself on the sofa, avoiding a broken spring with a neat twitch of his rounded hips, and took three newspapers out of a respectable black brief-case. “As a pressman, you will no doubt have read——”

  “I’m not a pressman.”

  “But you write for the press.”

  “Well?”

  “I beg your pardon, Mr. Pym. I took it for granted that since you are a writer for the newspapers, and since this has been made public, you—as one of the interested parties—must have read one or more of these little items, about Mrs. Greensleeve, my poor mother.”

  “I’ve read the piece in the Express, yes,” said Pym. “Not the others.”

  “Not even the article in the Sunday Special, Mr. Pym? Oh, come, come now. We’re men of the world, aren’t we? Surely, now, you’re not going to tell me that you don’t read the newspaper for which you write?”

  “I buy it every Sunday, yes. I usually look through it, of course. But as it happens I’ve been busy with other things in the last few days, and I didn’t even open a newspaper yesterday,” said Pym.

  Cicero Greensleeve looked at him, smiling, and, handing over a copy of the Sunday Special carefully folded back, pointed to a blue-pencilled cross on the Entertainments Page, and said: “I take it, then, that you have not read this?”

  Pym said: “You may take it that I haven’t and if you’ll excuse me I’ll read it now.” And he read of a respectable woman, the wife of a clergyman, who had given everything for love. She had borne children to her husband, had disliked them because they resembled their father, whom she hated, and at last fell in love with an actor. In the twilight of her unhappy life (yet was it after all so unhappy?) sick and alone, she put her life story into a play, and, driven raving mad by her sufferings, drenched herself in paraffin and burnt herself to death.

  “But this is a lot of damned nonsense,” Pym said. “It was an accident.”

  “That is very likely, Mr. Pym. I daresay it was an accident. I am sure that it was an accident. But who is to believe that it was an accident since responsible newspapers indicate that my poor mother killed herself with fire, like Brutus’s wife, in a fit of madness? And you must consider the living in their relation to the dead, Mr. Pym. It is clearly indicated that my mother was insane, in addition to being a most immoral woman. I am a professional man, Mr. Pym. I have my professional reputation—upon which my livelihood, and indeed my very life, depends—to consider. I am a family man. I am myself a father. I have marriageable daughters, Mr. Pym. You cannot be unaware of the fact that you have stigmatised them as the granddaughters of a mad wo
man. This is a serious business, Mr. Pym. This is libel. What do you propose to do about it?”

  “I don’t know what the devil I should do about it,” said Pym. “I don’t see that it has anything to do with me. I didn’t write the play. I certainly had no hand in putting out the little bits in the papers here. My conscience is clear. I suggest that if you want to make some sort of issue about it, you take it up with the papers that published the pieces you’re making such a fuss about.”

  “I can do that, certainly. But these things are better settled in a friendly way, Mr. Pym. As a lawyer, ha-ha! one of those so-called pettifogging lawyers of whom your colleague Charles Dickens wrote so bitterly, I always advise my clients to have as little as possible to do with lawyers and litigation. I am not litigiously-minded myself, strange as it may seem, although the Law is my profession and I am in the courts day after day. It is true that I have reasonable grounds for injunction. I can perfectly easily stop my unhappy mother’s foolish play before there is so much as a rehearsal. I can have it taken off,” said Cicero Greensleeve, snapping his fingers, “like that!”

  “All right then, do that,” said Pym. “Take it off. I don’t care.”

  “On the other hand, she was my mother and I am her son,” said Greensleeve. “Put yourself in my position. Consider the feelings of a son. My mother was an unworthy woman ——”

  “—She was nothing of the sort. She was worth … I don’t know what the rest of your family was like, but I’ll go so far as to say that she was worth you and all of them put together.”

  “That may be, or it may not be. It is not for me to say. But I have reverence for the memory of my father, Mr. Pym, and my first duty is to my family. I have no great desire, as you may imagine, to involve them in a sordid case of this kind, even if in doing so I might enrich myself.”

  “Why are you telling me all this? What has it to do with me?’’

  “I am telling you this, because it is in my nature to have an open heart, Mr. Pym. But you ask me what this has to do with you. Surely, Mr. Pym, you must know what it has to do with you? My poor mother wrote a play. You have got hold of that play.”

  “I got hold of nothing. Your mother gave me that play.”

  “May I ask when?”

  “Why, yes: when she was dying in the Lazarus Infirmary. She left a box of papers with a Mrs. Lincoln at 8, Damascus Terrace and gave me a written authorisation to collect that box.”

  “May I see the written authorisation?”

  “I think I left it with the landlady.”

  “I see. To collect; authority to collect her papers in her own handwriting, no doubt.

  “No. She was too ill to write. I wrote it from her dictation and she signed it.”

  “I have not the slighest doubt, Mr. Pym, that my unhappy mother intended her private papers to be handed over to her next-of-kin.”

  “What reason have you to believe that your mother cared two hoots about her next-of-kin, Mr. Greensleeve?” asked Pym. “She was glad enough to get away from her next-of-kin, and stay away for a little life-time—and by God, I can’t blame her.”

  Cicero Greensleeve smiled comfortably and shook an admonitory finger as he said: “Now, now, now, Mr. Pym; I have yet to see the situation that was improved by impolite personalities and blasphemy. No, Mr. Pym, I’m afraid—not that I’m doubting your word for one moment, mind—I’m afraid your case wouldn’t hold together for ten seconds in a Court of Law. Even if you had the document you speak of, it wouldn’t be enough. And even if you had known enough of the law to put my poor mother’s … dying request, or bequest as we might call it, ha-ha!—even if you had worded it in proper form, and had got the signatures of a couple of witnesses, it still wouldn’t do, you know, because that form of will, in this case, could be successfully contested by my Articled Clerk. How long had you known my poor mother?”

  “About ten minutes,” said Pym.

  “Ten minutes. How did you meet? … I’m not trying to cross-examine you; I’m simply trying to make your legal position clear to you and to me.”

  “I met your mother when she accidentally set fire to her clothes. She was burning, and although I was not briefed in the case, and in spite of the fact that she was neither my client nor my next-of-kin, I tried to put the fire out. Not being a bloody pettifogging lawyer I didn’t stop to weigh the pros and the cons of the thing. I shouldn’t be surprised that even if you set yourself alight I’d instinctively chuck a bucket of water over you. However, I daresay you’ll get your share of fire shortly after the Day of Judgment. I tried to help your mother—your poor mother, as you call her. She was living next door to me. She was terribly poor. She was starving——”

  “—Oh, poor mother, poor mother! Starving among strangers, when she knew that she only had to come to me——”

  “—Yes, I know. When she only had to come to you. Who wouldn’t rather starve to death or burn?” said Pym.

  “Mr. Pym, I cannot truthfully say that I like your manner.”

  “Mr. Bloody Cicero Greensleeve, I can truthfully say that I don’t like yours. Talk to me straightforwardly if you can, just for a minute. Make the effort, just for a minute. What are you driving at? In my way I’m a busy man. Say what you have to say, quick. I’m a patient kind of mug, but not with people I don’t like. Let us get this straight. First of all you come along threatening to take action for libel, or something, against two or three newsappers that I have nothing to do with. Then you threaten to stop a play I never wrote. And having, as you no doubt thought, created the proper atmosphere of legal terror and mystery, you come around to the ownership of your mother’s play. What’s your game?”

  “My game, as you choose to call it, should be obvious. Once identity is established, this play of my mother’s, together with the attendant publicity, is very likely to be injurious to me, professionally, and to my children. My mother, and my daughters’ grandmother, is stigmatised as an insane, suicidal prostitute—and a bohemian! I have therefore a perfectly reasonable and natural desire to take charge of this play, as is my legal right, with a view (if need be) to suppressing it. That, in a nutshell, is what you call my ‘game’. And speaking of games, Mr. Pym, may I ask what your game is?”

  “Look here, Mr. Cicero,” said Pym, “just one word of warning. If you grin and wink and leer at me, old as you are and fat as you are I might be tempted to wipe that expression off your face with the back of my hand. And when you start talking about my game, I feel very much inclined to pick you up by the collar and kick your fat little bottom downstairs. You’d better be civil. I haven’t got any game. Your mother said she didn’t want to be buried in a pauper’s grave, and I promised her that she shouldn’t be. She wanted to make some return, and gave me her papers. I was fully convinced that your mother’s play was completely valueless. It was only by chance that Rocky Gagan got hold of it. Meanwhile I kept my promise to your mother and saw that she wasn’t buried in a pauper’s grave. Nobody was more surprised than I when Gagan and his lady friend took an interest in that play. If you can make a ‘game’ out of that, go ahead.”

  “Where did you say my poor mother was buried?”

  “I didn’t say, and I won’t say.”

  “Oh dear me, poor mother! I can easily find out. A wreath, or a cross, a few flowers … Oh dear, oh dear! Yet I understand Mr. Pym, that, representing this play as your own property, you received certain monies for it, and signed an agreement whereby you were to receive further payments. Is that so?”

  “The play was my property because Mrs. Greensleeve—excuse me if I find it impossible to refer to her as your mother—gave it to me. I got fifty pounds for the option and a hundred pounds for the advance on royalties which amount to five per cent.”

  “It won’t do at all, you know, Mr. Pym. It just won’t do, you know. You have no right to that money at all, Mr. Pym. You have no right to that play. As my poor mother’s eldest son, it belongs to me, and you haven’t a leg to stand on. I’m afraid you’ll ha
ve to refund me that hundred and fifty pounds.”

  “Oh you are, are you?”

  Cicero Greensleeve nodded and said: “Naturally you will be reimbursed for any expense you may have incurred in connection with my poor mother’s funeral——”

  “What? Do you think I’d let a creature like you pay for that? The poor little lady would turn in her poor little grave.”

  “As you wish, Mr. Pym. I cannot, of course, compel you to accept money you prefer not to accept. If, however, you let me have the undertaker’s statement, I will deduct the amount of his bill from the little statement which, in justice to myself, I shall be compelled to send you to-morrow.”

  Pym struggled against a desire to kill him. The sleek, sly, audacious face of the solicitor appeared to blush, but the redness of it was in Pym’s eyes. Then he became calm and, after a few seconds of misty cogitation, said: “I see. I may consult my solicitor, I suppose?”

  “Naturally, Mr. Pym, of course you can. But I can tell you in advance that your case is as leaky as a sieve.”

  “I begin to think so too,” said Pym. “Is your brother also a solicitor?”

  “Decimus? No, he is not a solicitor, Mr. Pym. He is in business on his own—an estate agent, I believe. I hear he is doing quite well. I have not seen him for several years, the more’s the pity. Brotherly love, ha-ha! Brotherly love.”

  “Haven’t I seen his name on the boards—you know, on those boards outside houses for sale and to let?” asked Pym.

  “Very likely. Walbank, Greensleeve and Champion … very likely, very likely indeed,” said Cicero Greensleeve, in the best of tempers. “Well, Mr. Pym, there is our little matter clarified, without ill-feeling.”

  “You’ll be lucky if you get that hundred and fifty pounds,” said Pym. “I’ve spent a good deal of it, you know.”

  “We’ll see, we’ll see, Mr. Pym. The important thing is, I always think, to have the position clear—to clarify, clarify, Mr. Pym. Admit, now—confess, Mr. Pym—isn’t it better this way? Right will be done and your conscience will be clear, and there can be no hard feeling on either side.”