The Song of the Flea

by Gerald Kersh

  *

  Joanna Bowman said to Pym: “What’s this I hear? Am I to understand that you’ve been paying for this room for me?”

  “You’re supposed to keep quiet,” said Pym. “You’re not supposed to start jumping and flapping about. The more you rest, the sooner you’ll be out. Keep calm, Jo, and let nature take its course.”

  “I won’t keep quiet unless you give me a straight answer to a plain question: are you paying for this room I’m in?”

  “Well, yes. I am paying for this room you’re in. What of it?”

  She said: “You had no right to do it—no right, without consulting me. I didn’t know. I didn’t realise. You shouldn’t have done it. It isn’t fair. I’m going to tell them to move me back to the ward.”

  “Why? Isn’t it more comfortable here?”

  “That’s not the point. You had no right to do it. You have no right at all to impose this on me.”

  “To impose what?”

  “Gifts, obligations. I was perfectly happy to be in a ward, the same as everybody else. If I’d wanted to be in a private room I’d have said so myself. I’m not a pauper—I could have paid for it myself. And I will pay for it myself! Who are you to put me here, and put me there, without permission? Are you under the impression that, just because we’ve been in and out of bed together you have the right to move me about like … like a card in a pack that you paid ninepence for? I won’t let you.”

  “You idiot,” said Pym, “why must you be more stupid than God made you? What do I care if you heal up in a ward or a private room? I had you brought down here for my own selfish pleasure. I wanted to be able to come and see you at any hour of the day, and that’s why I took the liberty of having you shifted. Who, in God’s name, are you, that you should come between me and my harmless pleasure?”

  She said nothing for several minutes, but riffled the pages of a magazine. Pym had smoked half a cigarette before she said:

  “I don’t like it.”

  “What don’t you like? And why don’t you like it?”

  “Your paying for me here. I don’t like that. But if you want to know, what I like even less is that somehow or other I don’t mind your paying for me. That’s what I like least of all. I don’t like it. I never let any man pay for me before. With you, I don’t seem to mind. I don’t like that. It means there’s something strange going on. Lots of people have tried to give me things, buy me things. I always made a point—if I accepted—of paying them back in one way or another. But what I don’t like about this is that with you I get soft and lax … I don’t mind taking things from you. Lots of men have given me flowers. I just stuck them in a jug or something, and liked them purely and simply as flowers. You bring me flowers, and I like the flowers for your sake. I smell them. I don’t feel I have to give back value for goods received, in your case. That’s what I don’t like. And again, I don’t like the way I have to keep on thinking about you. I’m getting involved with you, and that is a thing I swore I’d never do with any man … I think it’s probably all because of the Boy Scout knife that poor man stuck into me a little while ago.”

  “As you say: poor man.”

  “What happened to him, Pym?”

  Pym said: “Why, he just ran away, and he ran into a truck.”

  “Was he hurt?”

  “He was killed,” said Pym.

  There was a silence, after which Joanna said: “Poor boy! But what could I do?”

  “Nothing, Jo. Nothing at all.’

  “But did it hurt him?”

  “No, not a bit.”

  For the first time Pym saw Joanna Bowman weeping. “What was there that I could do?” she said.

  “Nothing, my sweet. And as things are, it’s better this way.”

  “I never wanted to hurt him. It wasn’t my fault, Pym … it wasn’t my fault. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t do anything. It wasn’t my fault if I didn’t want to live with him, Pym. Why should I be forced to live with him if I couldn’t live with him? Just because he wanted to live with me … is it my fault that I didn’t want to live with him? I never wanted to hurt him or anybody, Pym! I only wanted to be left alone! I said to him a thousand times: ‘Why must I do what you want me to do simply because you think you love me?’ But no; it was useless, it was no use at all. And I won’t be a slave! I won’t be a victim! I hate myself for crying like this … but I won’t have it! What right have they to do this to me? What right?”

  “Better be calm, Jo.”

  “Oh God, how I hate the world!”

  “I love you, you know.”

  “I don’t see why,” she said, while Pym dried her eyes with his handkerchief.

  “I don’t know. I have fallen in love with you—don’t be alarmed, I’m not going to burst into tears or fall on my knees—I happen to have fallen in love with you, and I want to be with you, that’s all.”

  “I wonder what would happen then.”

  “I don’t know. All kinds of things might happen if we were together. There are places to go; there are things to see. If you saw what you saw, and I saw what I saw, and we were together, what we saw together might be twice as good; if we happened to be together. There’s no end to what might happen, if you and I were together. Didn’t anybody ever tell you, when you were in school, that the world is twenty-five thousand miles round? And didn’t you learn that a sphere has an infinite number of circumferences? Good Lord, Jo, if you loved me and I loved you, and we were together, there would be no end to what might happen to you and me around and around the world. If you accept me, and I accept you, and we blend—make one new thing between the old two of us, good Lord, we might even have a child together!”

  “I wonder what sort of monstrosity that would turn out to be,” said Joanna.

  “Oh, I don’t know. The probability is that it would be either a son or a daughter. So long as it had a pair of arms and a pair of legs, and only one head, what would be the difference? Between the two of us we’d probably make a tolerably happy creature of it, even if it had warts and a hump like Quasimodo. Only I fancy that you’d have to love me first, and I don’t think you do.”

  “One of the things that makes me so angry with myself is that I’m half inclined to believe that I do love you,” said Joanna Bowman. “I’m just about half inclined to believe that I do love you, as much as I could ever love anyone.”

  Then a nurse came in, followed by a doctor in a white coat. They looked at Pym, who was kissing Joanna Bowman on the forehead. She said: “I believe they’ve come to dress my wound, or something. Will you come again soon?”

  “To-morrow,” said Pym.

  “I’m sorry I was so emotional, Pym.”

  “I’m not, Jo.”

  *

  Pym was not unhappy now; he was not even angry. When he went to collect his typewriter, stationery, groceries and clothes from his flat in Battersea, he was aware of a certain lightness, a sense of relief. He had learned to hate that place, that loud-mouthed, lying bitch of a place. He hated the bed from head to foot and in every spring; hated the delicate-stomached hand-basin, the coy bathtub, and the hunger-striking water closet that had to be forcibly fed. He was shocked by the vile deceitfulness of the sitting-room table that had looked so good and behaved so badly. He wanted to go a long way away from that place. He despised the false pretences of its kitchen, with its greasy black slut of a gas stove and its snotty, bronchitic sink. He wanted to spit on the abominable rugs, and tear the sneaking curtains from their sly, slippery runners. It would have given him pleasure to take the treacherous chairs limb from limb, and draw and quarter the mean, treasonable sofa. No doubt the sly slippery landlord of that unsavoury furnished flat was ready to go to law and perjure himself to the seventh circle of hell for the sake of sixpence, Pym thought; otherwise he would have put his right fist straight through the perversely lying face that leered at him in the mirror, the leprous mirror, of the bathroom cabinet. It would have given him pleasure to go through the apartment with a bla
zing torch and leave it a heap of smoking ashes. He felt swindled, mocked and betrayed. Above all, he hated his typewriter. There was another sleek, slinking gold-digger. She seemed to have everything, and gave it all to you with voluptuous abandon … until you asked her just a little more than she found it comfortable to give. Then, self-seeking harlot that she was, she pretended to be indisposed. She was delicate, in spite of her hearty, robust, accommodating manner. She had periodic cramps in some mysterious part of her inside. She was capricious. She demanded constant attention. If she was not sufficiently petted, her letter E jammed; and if you used ever such a little force, her shift lock refused to do down. She seemed not to like her ribbon: she could not do anything with it. And all the time, she smiled and sighed, and gave you to understand that it was not her fault, that she was made that way, that she did so want to please you, but since she could not, well … you could go to hell.

  Pym was sick with loathing for this beautiful new typewriter. He wanted to get a screwdriver and take her apart, key by key and gadget by gadget, and drop her piece by piece into the river.

  But she squatted, imperturbable. You need me, she seemed to say, get rid of me if you dare. I don’t care. There are many more fools in the world.

  Pym seized her savagely by the handle. He had twenty-six shillings and ninepence in his pocket, and needed a room to work and sleep in. He thought of the clean, scoured landladies of the neighbourhood, and was sick at heart. Then he thought of Busto, that wicked little man, and remembered—he could not recall where he had heard it—a proverb: It is better to deal with the devil you know than with the devil you don’t know. Busto was a swine in greed and a cat in watchfulness; a wolf in snatching and a squirrel in hoarding; a bug to creep, a louse to cling, a leech to suck; flea-like in evasiveness, snake-like in pitilessness, maggot-like in impartial hunger. Yet Pym, laughing at himself between his teeth, found himself homesick for the single-mindedness of Busto and for the naïve nakedness of the curious squalor of his house.

  In this sort of muck, a man knew where he was. Black was black and white was white. You paid and stayed—or out you went. There was a queer kind of honesty in Busto’s place: no sidelong looks got you anywhere; no false promises carried you through; no smile masked a lie. Whatever you had, Busto got out of you—even a little truth, once in a while.

  Pym went to Busto’s house and said: “Got a room?”

  “Sure,” said Busto. “Lovely room. Ground afloor front room, sixteen a-bob a week.”

  “Nothing cheaper?”

  “No.”

  “Sixteen shillings!”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, all right. Okay.”

  Busto opened his left hand, touched the palm of it with his right forefinger, and said: “Hah?”

  Pym had sixteen shillings ready; a ten-shilling note and six silver shillings. Busto sneered a smile at him and said: “First of all you got a room for eleven a-bob upstairs. Hah? Okay. Now you got a sixteen a-bob room, ground floor. Hah? Okay, okay! You wait. To-morrow is better. Why not?”

  “Indeed, why not?”

  “A minute,” said Busto, and went downstairs. Soon he came back with a portable typewriter.

  “Mine! Mine!” shouted Pym.

  “Some fella so this fella finds it in-a street, so that fella bring it a-me because you got your name and address inside it. Okay? So I keep it for you.”

  “I gave you a forwarding address,” said Pym, looking hungrily at his old typewriter.

  “I forget it.”

  “Busto, you’re a liar,” said Pym, happily, “an unmitigated liar. Who was it that brought the typewriter?”

  “Oh, some fella.”

  “Did you give him anything?”

  “Hah?”

  “Did he leave an address?”

  “No.”

  “I would give that man my shirt,” said Pym. Then he took the new typewriter back to where he had bought it and they gave him ten guineas for it, and he was happy. Pym had not wanted to pawn his new suits and his overcoat; and in a mysterious way he had developed a great fondness for his old typewriter. It was, to him, like a wife after thirty years of marriage: he would not die of grief for the loss of it, but he was not himself without it.

  He typed:

  23456789-¾qwertyuiop3/8asdfghjkl;7/8zxcvbnm,.½”/@£&’()¼QWERTYUIOP1/8ASDFGHJKL:5/8ZXCVBNM?.%

  Then he wrote: The quick brown fox jumped right over the sly lazy dog. And: Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party. He made patterns with commas, obliques, ampersands, and dots. Soon the old typewriter took him to her bosom again, and they were one; and he let her peck away all that had come to the top of his consciousness.

  He wrote:

  Joanna, Joanna, I have been thinking of you constantly, my dear Joanna. Writing to you, although I am alone, I feel closer to you; I feel that I am in communication with you. I want to be near you because I love you. I love you because God made you well—beautiful in soul and body, strong and full of courage, clean and honest, keen and successfully shaped, finely tempered, polished, burnished, and finished … something like a knife with which you could defend your honour, kill a tyrant, cut down trees to build a house, fight a Last Battle, sharpen a pencil, build a ship in which brave men might sail to find new worlds, or clear a way through the jungle. When I think of you I think of a good blue blade made to take a razor-edge and a needle-point—and at the same time supple; a weapon for hewing things down, and an instrument for carving wonderful shapes out of what you have cut away. For all this, and for your beauty, and for other reasons which I cannot define, I love you and profoundly admire you….

  23456789-¾qwertyuiop3/8asdfghjkl;7/8zxcvbnm,.½”/@£&()¼QWERTYUIOP1/8ASDFGHJKL:5/8ZXCVBNM?.%

  … I love strength. I love nobility. I love that which is beautiful and good. Therefore, Joanna, I love you. Once I knew a man who used to stay up with me all night wondering which was best: the Good, the True or the Beautiful. We used to argue until the day broke. How young I must have been then! How can anything be beautiful unless it is good?

  You are the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. You are all that I aspire to. Something in my mind tells me that you and I are going to make great things together. Something tells me that you love me, and I tell you that I love you very dearly….

  23456789-¾qwertyuiop3/8asdfghjkl;7/8zxcvbnm,.½”/@£&’()¼QWERTYUIOP1/8ASDFGHJKL:5/8ZXCVBNM?.%

  … I’ll see you to-morrow and well talk again together. Something tells me that we are destined to be together.

  I love you. Once I had a young hawk with a broken wing. I offer you my heart, but—as then—carefully, with my finger-tips, as I offered him meat hoping to earn his love. Good night, dear heart. Good night.

  Then Pym took the paper out of the typewriter and tore it to pieces.

  *

  Busto unbuttoned his coat, as he usually did before going to bed. He preferred to sleep at odd hours. Now his clock—a fly-blown dial smaller than the cap of a small pickle-jar supported by a massive bronze Hercules—said that it was half-past eight in the evening. Therefore it must have been about ten past nine. Pym, heavy with melancholy and jerked alternately the four points of the compass by yearnings to work, sleep, drink and eat, heard an imperious knocking at the street door.

  Busto came up, groaning.

  “Hah?” he said. “Oh. Is you. Well?”

  A piercing voice, neither male nor female, said: “Is that you, Busto? Well, listen. My father wants to know if you’ve received a letter in a long narrow envelope, addressed to M’Gurk.”

  Busto said: “Hah! Lookatim! All dressed up.”

  “Did you or did you not receive a letter addressed to Mr. M’Gurk?”

  “Hah!”

  “In a long envelope.”

  “Hah!”

  “Did you?”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “Did you or didn’t you?”

  “Long envelope,” said Busto, with scorn. “You never got no long e
nvelope. Long envelope! Hah! Long envelope. You never even got a-short a-envelope.”

  “Look here, you! I know the law. You can get five years hard labour——”

  “Hah!”

  “Did you or did you not——”

  “No envelope.”

  “No letter at all addressed to M’Gurk?”

  “Go way.”

  “You’re sure, now?”

  “Lookatim—all dressed up,” said Busto. “Hah!”

  Pym went into the passage and saw Boysie M’Gurk frantically gesticulating with a fist no larger than a knotted rope, while Busto waited like a buzzard, black and dusty, avid and patient.

  “What’s up?” asked Pym.

  Busto did not give himself the trouble of lifting a finger. He pointed to Boysie with his chin, and said: “Long a-envelope, they want.”

  “We’ve got a contract lost in the post,” said Boysie. “Oh, it’s you. Still here?”

  “You’re looking remarkably elegant, Boysie.”

  “What? You never heard? The Miserable M’Gurks—you mean to tell me you never heard? ‘Man, Woman and Dog’—you never heard? There’s a contract in the post, gone astray. Oh, it’s okay, it’ll turn up, but——”

  “Things are going well then, eh?” said Pym to Boysie, who piped:

  “That new act of mine is going like a house on fire. I made them do it just like I said. I’m a dog with black spots and long ears right down to the ground. I steal the whole act. I get them rolling in the aisles. They pee themselves laughing.”

  “So, you’re a dog with black spots, are you? Just like you said, is it?” said Pym, “I seem to have some vague idea that I had a certain little tiny something to do with it.”

  “Well, it’s true that you kind of gave me the inspiration in the course of a discussion.”

  “I’m humbly grateful for your magnanimity in acknowledging the fact.”

  “Not at all, old man. Give honour where honour is due, I think. We’re top of the bill at the Hackney Pantheon. George Black’s interested. I wouldn’t mind betting we’ll be in the next show at the Palladium. I shouldn’t be a bit surprised.”